the one's i felt like marrying...

 My marriage ended irreparably in 1989. Part of the reason I think that I got married (to this woman) at all, was for the sake of bearing the brilliant son that we parented. And even though he was raised in a broken home, he turned out to be a spectacular and magnificent man. There were so many reasons why our marriage broke, faulty communication being primary and finances being the other. That intro is the launching off point for what I'll talk about next. 

In 1990 I had pretty much what was considered a "rebound fling"... Fresh on the streets and looking for action I met a woman at a holotropic breathwork group in Berkeley. She invited me home where I met her roommate, both of which were in massage school (the aforementioned National Holistic Institute) in Emeryville. They convinced me to join the school, invited me to live in their house, I ended up sleeping with this lady and felt like the proper thing to do was suggest we get married. But we didn't... I kinda cared for her roommate more, I dunno, it was weird times and I had just been flung out of the "perfect world" I had been living in for the previous 10 years. I did not love that woman, and in fact, there were a lot of things about her that annoyed me... I'm glad it was only a 6-month experience. Later, in a different holotropic breathwork group, there was that OTHER woman I spent one afternoon breathing with, she had more potential for being a keeper, but I was terrified by the prospect of being deeply in love and I escaped her successfully. (haha)

Then in the mid-90s, there was Deirdre. I loved her a lot, but she was not soulmate strength. She felt business class... by that I mean, she was a working man's woman... She loved work more than she loved me. There were class distinctions too that made us a never-will-work pairing... 

Leapfrog to around the year 2010. Yeahh, a long dry period when I was in the depths of bipolar hell when I had no interactions with people, at all. And then the dream project of my youth was born. Being a photographer. Since the time I first picked up an SLR camera as a freshman in high school, I dreamed of doing photography as my life's work. When I got married, all of my creative interests evaporated. I could no longer write, creatively, or at all. And I could not afford to shoot film. After my bipolar hell, that I felt inspired to do anything at all was miraculous. And that the first two things that sprung from my mind were to write a novel, and start a photography project to illustrate the ideas of my novel. well, it was as good feeling as being born again.

Over 7 years time, I wrote 500+ pages for this novel, and I photographed over 120 different women as a study of my novel's main character. Two of those women I had very strong heartfelt feelings for.

Scarlett and Presh. And I asked both of them to marry me. Not official kneeling down slipping a ring on their fingers, proposing... noo, and truly not (very) seriously at all... although Scarlett, yeah. I really did feel like I could have married her... we talked about it for a long time and she convinced me over and over (and over) that it was not what she wanted.  And with Presh, I just kinda thru the idea at her, "Hey, let's get married for a year... just for the heck/fun of it... if I drive you crazy, you can just say NO MORE..."  but she thought I would be the one that would tire of her... mind you, I was not in a relationship with either of these women. We were just friends...

How they slipped under my skin and inspired me, is the better story to share. I truly had experiences of both of these young women being artistic (and spiritual) muses for me. I had never even imagined that a person could influence another in the ways that these girls did. The creation of art, based on the image of a woman... where her character and her soul's essence is expressed and captured photographically, it's a remarkable interaction to experience with someone. Scarlett modeled for me more than anyone else did. And Presh was a close second (but really nowhere near as many photos were taken of her...) I have literally thousands of photographs of Scarlett. And probably only 500-1000 or so photos of Presh. 

Well, when I first felt inspiration for talking about these 2 women I did not know I was going to write such a long intro about all those others... and now I want to take a break and come back to go into more specifics about these two... later, when, I dunno, soon I guess..