THIS Rhett Butler Will Never Die

 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 car...

with just hours left in it's beating heart, September is coming to a close.  September is the fullest month of the year for me and this year was no exception. It was focused on celebrations of births and deaths in glorious splendor. For some reason right now I don't feel inspired like I usually do when I sit down to blog to go into any details about what events occurred, even though I really should. It was that spectacular of a month. Maybe this quick footnote right now will pull me back to write in fuller detail about the things that occurred before their impact fade from my memory. And maybe I'll even go beyond my normal blogging techniques and include some photos of the people and places that were seen. Why I really opened up this page to scribble thoughts upon tonight was to put some energy into the idea of reopening my "novel" and perhaps going back to work on it. When I tried to work on it last year, even though I made some truly grand progress in consider...

Relatively, I am not sad these days. It seems that as I keep up a regular practice of meditation - that is meditating for at least 15 minutes, once a day - I am able to refresh my spirit enough to cast off the creeping shadows of sadness and depression that approach my consciousness every day. There are things happening in and around about my life that could lead to a pretty strong episode of depression but the joy that clearing my energy via meditation is relatively saving my life right now. Fuuny, but I thought that I'd spend my time writing this blog energy talking about the things that are not going right that could bring on a depressive episode - but I didn't. I jumped right to the good part of the story and talked about what is working. I'm kinda proud of myself for doing that. And happy that this happened. All the same, just for the sake of clarity and record, I do want to talk about these things because they are not going to go away on their own, not very easily a...

So I want to talk a little bit about what a day in my life is like, what dayyys are like. What kind of different days I have, and how I determine whether a day was "good" or not. Now I'll say that most of my days are indeed "good" days. I rarely end the day mumbling to myself, "damn, that was a baddd day." I usually feel pretty content with the results from my efforts and activities. But that is in part because I've become as accustomed to the ways day generally go for me as I am. If someone else were to slip into my shoes and compare what a generally fine day is to me to what their days are like, there could be a lot to talk about. I don't have a lot of rules, nor do I have outlandish expectations set up for myself to achieve. This is actually admitting a lot of what is missing from my life.. I generally do not complete many things in a day because there is so little structure, or ambition. Okay, so a successful day for me, in general, wou...

I just signed up at this new website that serves as a sort of online booking agency for photographers. It's called SNAPM . (CLICK THIS LINK TO GOTO MY PROFILE!) The image below is what my profile page looks like. Check it out and let me know what you think. If you actually know me and would like to write a short review for me, let me know and I'll send you a link that you can use. Thanks!!

My photo shoot with Niki was much earlier this year, in March. She was the first model that I had found and made contact with at Model Mayhem . She lives in Stockton and at the time we first started talking about doing a shoot together, Stockton didn't seem that far away. I think it was actually February when we first made contact. She had made a comment on one of my photos. We had planned on doing a shoot on pretty short notice, like in March... but as some of you loyal readers will remember I fell into a pretty black depression during March and April. I contacted her again in early May and we had our shoot scheduled by the end of the month. It was a sunny day, temp in the low 80's and I was doing a dog walking job at the time. I remember that the timing was a bit critical in that I could only leave the dog alone in its house in San Ramon for 4-5 hours. I had to jet out to Stockton, do the shoot and then be back in San Ramon in time to take the dog for another walk. ANYWAY.....

I became fascinated by Wynd the first time I looked at her portfolio on Model Mayhem . Mind you, I don't really have an interest in shooting nudes and that is the way Wynd prefers to model. We never discussed it as I guess my portfolio speaks for itself. No, what intrigued me about Wynd was her eyes and her hair. Later, as we communicated more, I became fascinated about her lifestyle too. Anyway, Wynd is a professional model and no longer does shoots in which she trades her time for a cd or prints (TF-CD/P). I came upon her at a time when I was sort of able to talk her into a trade with me though. I gave her a condition, that if she were able to get a paying gig on the day of our shoot it would be ok to cancel on me. I also told her that I would give her a "gratuity" of $20 so that she could buy some dinner after our shoot (or do whatever she wanted to with the money). We started this conversation in March and she said that if she was going to do a shoot with me it wou...

maybe moods are seasonable. and i'm not talking about SAD . because i just came through one of the most wonderfully mooded dark seasons (winter) that i can remember. this winter fed my motivations. no, i'm talking about them, moods, having their own schedules of necessity. that there needs to be a time of sadness, a time of gladness... that they balance each other. and mabye this is just something inside the experience of the bipolar. i don't know because i don't really know what moods regular people go through. if i had not started taking the seroquel again last week how much longer would my mood of positivity continued? indefinitely as far as i could tell. as i feel now, i want to put my camera away for a good long time. i think the "Cemetery Girl" project has come to an end. i know i said this in an earlier post. i'm just reaffirming it now. there have been a total of 5 models from ModelMayhem that i have cancelled working with. better than them canceli...

don't worry, i will write a full and proper review of the concert for publication at Ground Control Magazine in a few days. right now i need to share and document some of my immediate feelings. first off, the first most amazing thing that happened tonight was arriving at the ticket office at Slim's and finding once again that my name was NOT on the guest list. Slim's is losing my respect in this department because as usual, once the tour manager is found everything is rectified. this was amazing in a NEGATIVE sense. next amazing thing was meeting Renee (Tickledrop) in line. in fact, i didn't even take 2 steps from the ticket window when she walked up to me and called out my name. i have only seen this woman once before and that was in Santa Cruz at the ABPT show back in November 2006. first thing she said was to comment on, how in my blog i talked about coming off meds. she said that she could tell that a definite change had occurred in my countenance, that i seemed mo...

last you heard from me i had decided to not shoot more fashion oriented "Cemetery Girls" because they were distracting me from writing my novel. the last two, very specifically focused "Cemetery Girls" i shot were two teenage girls in my ugly, muddy, and uninviting cemetery in Danville, the actual location of the cemetery where my novel takes place. and these shoots were fantastic! the cinematic quality of the shots we got were really phenomenal in aiding me create very real visual representations of what i imagine my novel's character to actually look like. exactly what i hoped to achieve. these photo sets are the "Kim" and "Helen" sets. well, part of my being able to photograph Helen was agreeing to also shoot her friend Nisha. the thing was, that after Helen's shoot at the Danville cemetery i felt that there were not many more photos that could be taken there; the place is so uninspiring. so today i suggested to Nisha that we go to the...

i just need to talk out loud a little bit. i hit a new level of understanding about the vision of my novel today. it is a bit of a breakthrough in some ways. i photographed a teenage girl in the actual cemetery where my story takes place. THIS is what my entire "Cemetery Girl" photo project has been about. enabling me to have a real vision of what my character truly may have looked like. this girl, Kim, is the daughter of one of my oldest acquaintances from high school. Kim is the exact age of my novel's main character, and even though she does not look exactly like i imagine my character's looks to be, capturing her today, walking into this cemetery for the first time ever helped me imagine in a very realistic sense just what it may have felt like for my character the first time she stepped foot here. whether i will do more work with Kim in the cemetery later, or if I will entirely change the focus of who i shoot for this project to be just teenage girls, i don't...