Madonna and kids, exiting the Castro Theater, San Francisco, CA.
Okay not that Madonna.
This week, in a valiant effort to continue to post fresh content here when I am feeling a lot more like the cat pictured on the most recent LD Weekend bonus shot, I have decided to tinker with and post an assortment of more abstract-ish photos from the LD photographic archives.
Beyond the prevailing reasons outlined in the Weekend bonus shot of late (stress! and also, burnout!), I also happen to believe a number of things which these various blurry images will do a reasonable job of conveying. Namely:
- Life, in its infinite complexity, eludes representation in any form, literary or pictorial. Therrefore, blurry may well be more honest. And,
- Photographic images can only convey a fraction of what they might be (might be!) attempting to convey, in the way of fleeting moments. Therefore, why bother trying to render those moments “accurately”? And,
- If, for the past three-plus years, I’ve made some sort of compact with the world around me (i.e., You, gentle reader) to take a stab at consistently representing my (mannish lesbian) parental experience, and stress and burnout is part of it (insofar as such things are unavoidable elements of life, even currently-in-reasonable health middle class life), then mightn’t a spate of blurry images of marginally determinant subjects be in keeping with that compact? I hope so, ’cause that will be this week’s theme.
Since banned books week at the end of September, I’ve had some pieces on LGBT family kids’ books in the buff-n’-polish queue, and since Nat’l Coming Out Day I’ve had something brewing on the winner of the LD swag give-away and the results of this year’s Reader Survey (really, really helpful, heartening, and very much appreciated). Those items are still forthcoming, along with a fix of the various mishaps my recent DIY WordPress upgrade made hap’.
But then the Langbehn-Pond family lost their court case, and Mitrice Richardson was released by authorities, likely mid-bipolar delerium, into the dark of night, not to be heard from since. To which one must add all the hate  and paranoia raining down on us from the extreme, anti-gay, anti-miscegenationist, anti-Obama right wing. Kept in check by — wait! there is no principled entity on the right keeping its ugly ugly id in check! That, and the usual private sphere developments, which in the long term aid my gratitude and insight, but in the short term can just plain bum my high. (“High?!” you say?)
All this makes the start of Kindergarten look ever so sweet, doesn’t it? Also probably makes you glad I’m sticking to blurry photos this week.
The blurry photo for today was taken this past Baba’s Day, as we were leaving the Castro Theater in San Francisco. (We’d seen Free To Be… You and Me, the most apropos Baba’s Day film this side of Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood.) What I like about the moment is not just the everyday-ness of my beloved’s motherhood — the umbillically attached kids, casual appendages — but the fact that my sister and I, decades ago, espied the same doorway and its wash of daylit bright following the old timey matineés our Pops took us to, so often.
Now at 88 fast going on 89, there are no more matineés with Pops, at the Castro or pretty much anywhere else. But he still tucks me in at night (or is it me tucking him in?), with a 9:30pm phone call. The kids are asleep, the place is picked up (enough), and we both spend a little time painting pictures of the events of the day, in all their blurry accuracy.
Bring on the blur!