ericdravyn

HENRY ROLLINS Says:

"Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have."



So I went Walkabout for a while...

Got back from New Orleans and kept in touch with friends down there on a daily basis; not going to get on a rant about all the fucked up things that happened and are happening down there... as with anything else, if you weren't/aren't there, you just don't know... so shut up.

Had a birthday; no big deal even though it was a "milestone" birthday, whatever that means...
I have never known what it means to "feel your age" and I still don't.

Went "walkabout" for a month or so... cut off all contact with 95% of everyone outside of those that kept me alive and working.
Every couple of years, I need to unplug and just wander around to get my head back on straight.

Amongst the many places I ended up was FDNY Ladder 7/Engine 16 in Manhattan on 9/11/05. I think many people have a vague impression/remembrance of 9/11... sadly I also think that many politicians use the tragedy to further their own goals and agendas... again, not going to get on a rant as we all know what's going on.
If you want to see the real aftershock of 9/11, go visit a NYC firehouse on the anniversary and play with the fatherless children that are climbing in and out of the firetrucks their fathers once rode in. Have the survivng firefighters welcome you and feed you as if you were family... without reservation or taking no for an answer. Watch the firefighters and their families watch CNN and MSNBC replay and replay the planes going in over and over. Watch their faces as they watch footage of the towers going down as they remember being there and the friends and family who were inside at that moment.

Brings things rather sharply into focus, doesn't it?
For those people, 9/11 was yesterday.
Everyday.
Every single day.

The Walkabout thing doesn't always help that much; there are too many bad things in my head... years working at a psychiatric institute trying to actually make a difference and help the kids stuck there.
Seeing the things that people can do to other people is sometimes beyond belief... parents, friends, relatives, and even some of the so-called care-givers at this place were all predators or some other form of destructive piece of shit.
Not one single day went by in that place where I didn't think to myself, "I thought I heard/saw the worst, most fucked up thing ever yesterday... today I heard/saw something even worse..."
Hard to let that shit go, but at least I never had a fraction of the brutal shit to deal with that they did... those kids were survivors, pure and simple, and far stronger than I will ever be...

Lots of other stuff in there as well; have yet to deal with my father's lifelong illness and subsequent death,
my mother's slow descent into infirmity and neurosis,
my brother in prison,
my alienation of many of my friends due to my frequent travels and disconnection from society.

Hiding out in NYC these days and about to try to re-embark upon a photographic oddyssey... first stop wil probably be shooting a SG application photo set for a good friend of mine...

Working on getting on with things and repairing relations where I can and trying to have some semblance of a not-so-normal life and make some photographs along the way.

We'll see what happens...