the emotion of a polaroid

I have a dear dear friend of mine who keeps a shocking list of photographs to his person. they amass tons and tons of pictures of people from their past, loves and friends and places and times and dates. Almost like an encyclopedia or record of their movements. "Where was I on June 4th of 2007? oh that's right, here is the picture. That was nice. A good moment." He even keeps video of snippets of his life, snapshots of things. Moments of memory and feeling. And he gazes upon them with longing eyes, with the face of a time traveler who is trapped in "groundhog day". Like that place and those feelings can be revisited at a moment's notice. Scroll back with thumb up or down, press, play, reimagine the present as if those pasts could be futures. But it's not. Never will be. Only something that happened once.

I wish I could help him see how romanticized we make the past. How decadent it always will be after the fact, but when in the present it just is another second ticking by. Something rarely appreciated in the now, but relished in a different tense. But I love him to death. Like I said, he is a dear dear friend. Part of me wants to shake him, tell him to let go, but the other part wants to just hug him and say everything is going to be alright, which I don't know for a fact that it will be, but it makes us all feel better by saying it.

There is fellow in front of me, which I passed as I sat down outside my favorite coffee shop in Birmingham, who is reading a book about how to write. And I find that incredibly odd. Almost wrong. That a writer a) would teach a person to write their own style b) would propose such writing in a "how to" book c) that someone would think that's the best way to learn how to write d) that publishers would lessen literature with such works. Call it integrity or jealousy. That I would not sell my ideas for numbers or moving units. Or that I wish I could market a best seller based simply on the fact of how a sentence should be structured based on so and so genres. Who knows? I probably do. It's best described as a love/hate feeling.

First of all, the only way to learn how to write is to write. And to read books not about writing, but that are filled with writing. Dive knee deep into a classic novel, search the mind of the author, figure out the WHATS and WHYS, not necessarily the delivery device they employ. I love artists not schooled in the art they master. Melville, Kubrick, Vonnegut. People who just did what they felt made sense to them, their way of talking to all of us. The only way things made sense. I hope that my poor education and my poorer attempts at whatever you would call this could only be held in the slimmest light to theirs. Mostly, I'm grasping at straws for grasping's sake, but I won't stop until all the keyboards are destroyed, until my brain falls apart, until my fingers won't work, until all the paper and ink run out.

But, until that time, or until a time when my writing is worth a shit or a dime or nickel or something, I'll just bang away on this keyboard, this love/hate feeling, this capturing of a polaroid, of an idea or moment of the past, which makes me want to write about it and solidify it, making whatever I recall and say romantic and meaningful. But sometimes a car is just a car. And a building is just a building. And a kiss is just a kiss. And an old picture is just an old picture that you can recall in your old age and remember a time when your skin was tighter and your eyes were better and times were simpler and schools were better and you didn't have to deal with the mess of passing away.

Here is another moment. Take the picture, please.