continued from here

Among the many rain-like drops falling from Eve as she emerged from the pool, a single drop, a little larger than the others, caught Adam’s eye.  He studied it in the instant that it existed, a life in the eyes of God, he imagined.  A Truth came to him cloaked in a vision.  As the drop fell, he could see it speeding up faster and faster before reaching a point where it didn’t speed up anymore.  It’s progression toward the ground was then linear having reached a balance between the push of the water surface against the movement of the air out of the way and the return of that air into the wake of the water.  It was an honest mistake that he had never seen it before, he though, and he wondered if Eve could see within his eyes the understanding that had taken hold of him.  In a short instant, the world snapped into relief for him.  He saw her body edged in gold the way the sun was rising behind her, coating the edges of her form yet leaving the front of her body rather blue and gray, almost devoid of color.

He said to her, “There is no color, only that which is revealed by the light.”

Eve studied him and cocked her head.  ”The goodness is revealed but is still there, hidden like a distant shore is hidden by a dense fog.”

“It does not exist without our gaze upon it.  It is our recognition of the color that we appreciate, yet without our eyes, the color isn’t there.  Outside of us, the color does not even matter.”  Adam picked up a large stone.  ”This stone is heavy, but to you is immobile.”  He dropped the stone to the soft mossy ground where it sunk in denting it deeply.  ”We don’t sink into the ground, but the stone does.  The stone is hard to me, but is not hard to Him.  He could make the stone so that it never existed.  So how can color be an absolute without our eyes?  Your hair is golden and beautiful to me but to the butterfly, it is as a field of grass to rest upon.  I have seen this.  Do we even exist without His eyes and ears looking and listening to our prayers?”

He saw a tongue of fire close to the horizon different from the other fires he had seen in the forests of the plains.  It stretched upward into the sky curling like a shallow stream on flat ground searches for the ocean.  Eve stared into his eyes as she walked toward him.  She dragged his brown hair behind his right ear and kissed his cheek but he did not react.  She traced her finger on his forehead and across his eyebrow and down to his temple yet his ocean blue eyes never met hers.  She removed her hand from his face and rested it on his dirty shoulder and turned to look toward the horizon which occupied him with such intensity.  But the earth and sky was only filled with the same beauty which always amazed her and she assumed he was also entranced by the remarkable sunrise.

These bobcat snowplows look even more bad-ass in 6 inches of snow, but no one seems to remember where the keys are, I guess.

The earlier snowless shots are HERE.

A lesser man might take to his blog to complain about his coworkers.  The total and complete lack of work ethic might bother this man.  Seeing them playing video games all day while this man slaves away at the less glamorous aspects of photography might make this man cringe and beg for mercy.  This lesser man might point out the base, foul and annoying aspects of some of his coworkers “talents” for constant and unending variations on belching and his ability to ignore the loudest speakerphone.  Every day.  Every single day.

This lesser man might complain in his blog about trying to “think positive” and having that positive attitude melt away after the twelfth time his coworkers scream at how close that paper airplane was to making it through the door to the office, but that it landed instead on my light kit once again.  This lesser man might feel a slight ringing in his hearing because blasting the soundtrack to The Guardian is preferable to hearing, “HENH!?!?!?!” every time someone says ANYTHING to one of his coworkers.  For example:

LARRY: Want to see this cool game I just found?

ROBERT: HENH?!

LARRY: Check out my high score.  I used the multiball.

DAVID: It seems harder than it should be.

ROBERT: HENH!? belch WHOA! WHERE DID THAT COME FROM.  BETTER THAN COMING OUT THE OTHER END, AM I RIGHT?  HAHAHAHAHA

LARRY: Wow, I’m still going.  I’m a pinball wizard!

ME: (put on headphones)

LARRY: Let’s throw this paper airplane around for an hour!

ROBERT: HENH?!

LARRY: (throws paper airplane which lands on top of my light stand bag)

ROBERT: AHHHHOOOOOOOO, WHERE DID IT GO?

LARRY: It went over the fence.  Don’t let it touch Jon or he’ll punch you in the face.

ROBERT: (knocking over everything) JON, PLEASE DON’T PUNCH ME IN THE FACE IF YOU CAN HEAR ME

ME: no promises

ROBERT: HENH?!

LARRY: He said, ‘no promises’.

ROBERT: OH, JON. WHAT DID I EVER DO TO YOU (throws paper airplane)

LARRY: OH! Just missed my all time score.

DAVID: You were so close.

ROBERT: WHERE IS MY STAPLER! IT KEEPS DISAPPEARING.  CAN I BORROW SOMEONE’S STAPLER PLEASE?!

(Seriously.  I just transcribed all of this from reality.)

A lesser man might transcribe word-for-word the ridiculousness he hears every day and change the names to protect those coworkers.  A lesser man might see a trailer for the upcoming film Act of Valor and hear the words,

“You live your life by a code. It’s your shoreline, it’s what guides you home.”

and this lesser man might be inspired by this and by his own code, an ethical disposition which has been like a precious life-preserver in the face of coworkers who are lazy and who revel in things one might find disgusting, base, foul, juvenile or just plain wrong.  And this lesser man might do a job search on the more difficult days or close himself off or snap at an innocent person who is just ignorant at that moment, and not stupid like his coworkers.

I am that lesser man.

My mom forwarded this story to me that I wrote when I was 8 years old…

Sometimes you preposition snow plows when the forecast calls for 5-8 inches of snow.  In Chicago, this is a good practice.  Today, even though it is 48 degrees out, I can imagine the sun-dried pavement covered knee-deep in powder in 24 hours.  It’s not pessimism, it’s anticipation.

The payoff shots are HERE.

In 2011, I shot more than 20,000 photos, keeping around 17,000 of them, at 343 photo shoots (not including physician headshots).  Someone in my office suggested that I do a, “Photos of the Year,” but narrowing down 17,000+ photos to 24 or so that are the best is maybe too difficult for me to accomplish in one or two afternoons.

So, I’ve narrowed it down to just under 200 picks.  Where I can, I’ve added captions to explain what’s going on in the photo, my impressions at the time, behind the scenes photo setup info, etc.  For now, enjoy this group of my favorites from this year.

Thanks for watching.  Check out the individual pics for the comments on Flickr.

There are many things in this world that are almost perfect.  Pringles, for example, would be perfect if they satiated you.  Unfortunately, you crave more the more you eat which, lucky for Pringles, keeps you purchasing can after delicious can.  My sister used to joke that they were laced with Addicto, a secret additive which made you crave them equally the instant after you swallowed one.  If Addicto exists, there are many more products laced with it such as Coke, Pepperoni Pita Stuffs (discontinued) and a particular sandwich that a woman used to make for me when I was a kid.  Back in early grade school, when I was around 10 years old, there existed this great place called The Deli.  I’m sure they served lots of different types of foods, but the only thing I ever got there was the grilled ham and cheese sandwich.  Since I’ve grown, I’ve tried many different combinations of ham and cheese and bread in a laborious attempt to replicate the recipe only to discover that I will never successfully figure it out.  As the youngest and only boy in a family full of women, my needs were not usually catered to nor acknowledged.  I also had very nerdy parted hair and aviator glasses which made bullies want to beat me up with the same craving as eating a can of Pringles.  I was so nerdy, I even had hand-me-down clothes from my older sisters.  In early grade school, I was given my sister’s used girl jeans.  Even though I was told they were, “unisex,” I could tell by the pattern on the rear pockets that they were only for girls.  So they sat in my drawer for a long time ensuring that I wore my blue uniform dress pants during the hours after school when I would act out desperate scenarios with my GI Joe action figures alone in my room.

Every few weeks, my mother or older sister would bring me to The Deli.  My mind is fuzzy on the details, but the sandwiches I remember clearly.  At home, we had cold cuts which were so uniform that they could have been in the army.  A home sandwich was very orderly with two slices of identical meat, mustard and two pieces of dry white bread.  The Deli sandwich was like Jazz in comparison.  A rough mound of very thinly sliced ham was covered in cheese and in some kind of amazing bread that I can’t quite remember.  That’s not to say that my home grilled ham and cheese was bad.  On the contrary.  My mom used to make a grilled ham and cheese cooked on an old peeling frying pan that probably contained equal parts burned butter and teflon.  It was so pressed down it was like an eraser.  Haven’t you ever wanted to bite down on an eraser just once and have it be a delicious flavor?  It starts out a little rubbery, then break the surface and it’s gooey and hot, tangy, sharp with sweetness and it fills you with a warmth, a warmth not due to the content of the sandwich, but with the content of the act of it having been made for you as a special treat.  The Deli version was this multiplied by a thousand.  Don’t you see?  My mom told me that the woman who worked at or owned The Deli thought I was such a cute little kid that she loved it when I came in there.  “They never give people that much ham.  She must really like you,” they would tell me.  I would stare ahead in disbelief looking just past the sandwich into a corner without tables or chairs or details.  In a life full of bullies and disappointed parents and sisters busy fighting or pitying you for attracting the negative attention of the parents, someone who loves you just because you are cute and you like their cooking, is magical.  Isn’t that some kind of purity that we all deserve?  Fuck.  What do I have to do to reproduce this sandwich?  Find someone, woo her, love her, get her to love me completely…no scratch all of that.  Go somewhere, meet someone who loves me “just because”, freak out, confirm the impossible through various successes and missteps, delight in the spring of serendipity, marry them, be with them and love them completely, and maybe, fuck I hope so, just maybe she will make me a fantastic grilled ham and cheese sandwich and that day I can stop looking forever for that little ingredient that was missing all along.

Recently, the town I live in held a small photo contest on facebook.  They asked local photographers to shoot “A Day in the Life of Evanston”.  I thought this could be a good idea if people participated.  So I put the date into my calendar and set myself up to take some shots.  During the week prior to the magic date, I thought of several ideas that would say, “Evanston,” but which would also showcase a certain time of day or be cool to look at.  I considered setting up a camera in the middle of the main street and doing a kind of photo mosaic, dividing the image into 12 strips and putting a different time of day in each strip.  This would take 12 hours plus editing.  Scratch that.  Then I considered shooting the Evanston lighthouse, but I thought that was too predictable.  Everyone is going to shoot that.  So I considered driving around and looking for something to document like a childbirth, a fire, a wedding, who knows.  Maybe I could spend the day in the Emergency Room of Evanston Hospital.

As the day went on, I figured no one would shoot the lighthouse after all because it’s too predictable!  It would also be a popular choice among the people running the contest because the lighthouse is the symbol of the town.  OK, cool.  So how to shoot the lighthouse so that it’s not the standard shot that was on the parking permits.  Oh, I know!  I’ll shoot it just after dark when the sky is cobalt blue but too dark to see as blue unless you do a time-lapse shot.  I had a few hours to kill so I watched The Bang Bang Club.  This is the story of four combat photographers who were capturing the fighting and effects of war in South Africa just before and after the fall of apartheid.  These were very violent times and two of the photographers in this club won Pulitzers for their photographs of the extreme violence and famine there.  But the movie also tells how each of these men were separately affected by the violence and their own role as documentarian in the face of what to do as a human being in a life or death situation.  It shows the personal struggle each of them encountered as thinking and feeling artists trying to inform the world visually as to what was going on.  My own career has not been focused on the exploitation of violence or combat but I’ve always flirted with that as an exciting and important move.  Once people start paying you for your images, what you photograph takes a front seat to “what makes money”.  I took a lot of documentary film production classes in college and I still remember the lessons well.  So I realize that the role of the documentarian isn’t an exclusive or transparent one.  Through the very act of observation, you change that which you study.  I also know, or think I know, what it means to be a modern photojournalist and unfortunately a lot of the important imagery is going underappreciated and flat ignored by the desensitization of the West (and the world).  We’ve frankly been so overexposed to ultraviolence that the prize-winning shots aren’t making a dent on most peoples’ psyche.  Do we continue to fight the good fight and show the world the reality behind war?  Do we stop covering it because people don’t care?  Are we simply making art at the expense of others?

After the movie was over, I threw my equipment into the back and got into the car about 10 or 15 minutes after sunset.  I started driving.  It was becoming a very dark night and the headlights of the other drivers were glaring into my eyes.  I figured I’d drive just past work, make a right and it would take me straight to the lighthouse.  But as I approached the dip that goes under the train bridge, there seemed to be an accident up ahead.  The cops blocked off the road in front of me.  Another cop blocked off the road behind me.  There were people running around the front of a stopped minivan just on my side of the intersection about four cars ahead.  As the police started to clear our cars from the intersection, I knew I’d be driving right past the accident.  I considered double parking and photographing whatever it was as this was my chance to cover something that was definitely happening on this “Day in the life of Evanston”.  The stars were aligning, so to speak, with me carrying quite a lot of camera equipment in the trunk and looking for something to shoot right then and there, I could see the shot ideas forming in my head.  The cops near the front of the minivan had blue-white flashlights which would light the scene beautifully and contrast with the orange sodium lights under the bridge.

From my driver’s seat, I could see that the accident wasn’t between two cars.  Rather someone was down on the ground, having been hit by the minivan.  This was more serious than I had thought.  I continued forward in the caravan as we left the intersection and I drove to within 10 feet of the body.  People weren’t running anymore.  No one was around her.  Her eyes were locked unblinking on the stars.  A splash of black blood had flowed from her mouth where it remained.  The rotating red and blue lights traced the outline of her body and her surprised face.  She was alone.

I drove to the lighthouse and completed my photo shoot.  I lay on the ground steadying my hands and arms against my face and chest, breathing slower to a standstill and clicking off the one and two second handheld shots.  Afterward, I watched the long beam of the lighthouse extend out and blend with the darkness of Lake Michigan. 

I thought any time you want to extend the human experience into a new and rewarding area, it is a risk however you do it. Some people join the coast guard to jump out of helicopters into the ocean at night so they can save lives and so that others can benefit from their experience, knowledge and training. It is the same whenever you take that leap from the status quo and try to find a great photo, a new job or love. My sister has been going through a divorce for the past four years. It is something that will scare anyone away from ever getting into a serious relationship. Often I’ve said to myself that it is better to just play it safe and stay alone. But loneliness is self-destructive and great joy can be found in the eyes and lips and soul of another. Unfortunately, that kind of reward only comes after really knowing someone and risking embarrassment and rejection. I guess all we can do is find someone you think you can trust and put your trust in that person. Will that seed grow into something wonderful and lifelong? No one knows. I suppose it is a decision made every day by both people in the relationship. Every day you decide that this is the person I want to be with. Hopefully those decisions are only difficult at a very small number of times like at the beginning, at vows, after a challenge, and every other day is a promise kept to each other and to yourself to be true to your ideals, to the teachings you were raised with, so that when you look up to your reflection you can smile with sunshine in your heart, sunshine that grows that seed of trust into a tree of life.

For some, life is short.  At the end, hopefully you have a view of the beautiful post-sunset star-speckeled sky so you can stop for your last moment and wonder what it was all about.

Click the HD button to view the higher quality version of this video.

Here are some of the photos from the event:

Today I photographed Taffy Apple Day in the cafeteria at work.  I have no deep thoughts about this.  It was simply a quick little shoot.  Nothing to report here.  On the other side of the cafeteria, they are trying to get coffee addicts to stop using 4 million Styrofoam cups a year across the hospital system (4 hospitals).  So they are offering that people instead purchase a branded coffee mug, like everyone has seen.  So I shot a photo of someone bringing theirs back to complain that the lid was cheap and broken.  See, the problem with trying to modify people’s habits against their will is that people are already looking for a reason not to comply.  Sure, everyone thinks Styrofoam is bad and no one likes using it.  But people like their little conveniences too, like not having to wash their own dishes.  Take it from me.  I eat out almost every meal.  Many people balk at that but the way I usually explain it is that I have dozens of personal chefs scattered around the north shore of Chicago.  Sure, I could save a little money and make my own food, but the effort involved is annoying.  First, I have to go to cooking school and graduate.  Then I have to get a liquor license and the proper health code permits.  Next is fire insurance because potentially burning down the apartment complex is not something I can handle financially at the moment.  Then I have to get containers to serve the food in.  Then I have to hire drivers to take the food, wait for my call and then bring the food back to me.  And that just seems silly.  Isn’t it just easier to work with the people who have done all of that work already?  I don’t even have table candles with tea lights.  Oh wait, I do have that.  OK, there’s that.  But all of the rest just seems insurmountable.

If you are too weak to walk, I’ll lift you on my shoulders. If you are too tired to laugh, I’ll sing you to sleep. If you are scared of your nightmares, I’ll conquor your demons. If you are hungry for contact, I’ll fill you with love. If your shoulders are shaking, my coat will fit you. If you’re longing for feedback, I was raised by a mom and two sisters. If you want to have fun at a car show, I can usually tell when my river of information has crested. If your knees are two wind-bent willows, I can be your oak. If you are too drunk to lay your head down anywhere except the toilet seat, I’ll still love and respect you in the morning. If you were hurt in the past, hey, so was I. If you want all of these things or none of them, I’ll understand. If you cry out at the injustice of the world, I’ll be your wailing wall. If you take up arms, I’ll be your muscle. If you make a big deal out of it all and beat my chest with your arms, I’ll take it with patience. This I can do for you because my love feeds off of your love like two wildfires taking back settled land. This I can do for you because I believe in something larger than what is in front of us at this moment. This I can do for us because we is the stronger form of you and me.

I have a song in my heart that I like to listen to. Maybe sometime I’ll whisper it to you from my lips to your lips and that song will sit in your heart as well.

Today is my birthday. One of the traditions my family has on birthdays is to give everyone at the table a small present.  I think because my parents were raising three kids, it was a way of reducing the amount of jealousy and door slamming among the non-birthday kids after all that sugar and no presents.

So in keeping with that tradition, I’m giving all of you a small present today.  It’s a story that I’ve been working on that I can’t seem to finish.  Sometimes when I am laying in bed, half asleep, I think of scenes for movies or books that seem like they would be great, if only they could be fleshed out into larger stories.  But oftentimes, I can’t think of the rest of the story or I am just not interested in the scene enough to make it larger.  Here’s one I’m calling…

Still Waters

Rebecca always wanted to be a teller in the First District Bank of Waco, Texas.  From the time when she was small and watched her father get his paycheck cashed from the impressive looking woman behind the small thin bars, her deliberate way of interacting with people, pausing before carefully folding out the bills, had always seemed like a great job to her.  But Gillian, the heavy-set manager with the thick southern drawl and red hair bunned up in the back, sympathetically told her, ”Honey, there’s nothing I’d care for more than seeing you up at that counter helping people with their financial needs.  However, you know that you’re a bit on the quiet side.  And until we can get that little voice of yours to be heard through that glass, well darlin, I’m just not sure I can put you in that position.”  Rebecca’s chin caved into her chest as the words weighed down on the back of her head and neck.  She cleaned the spotless fingernails on her left hand with the thumbnail of her right before folding them across each other as her boss stood up to imply that the meeting was over.

So how was it that Rebecca now found herself holding a silenced 9mm pistol thinking back to when she was five years old saying, ”I’m doing it daddy, I’m doing it,” as she rode her bike away from her father’s open arms, the playing card slapping against the spokes of her back wheel in slow motion, the sound mimicking the claps of the customers and staff of the bank, cordite smoke from the littered brass shell casings filling her nose, the money counter throwing crisp twenties into the air as they fell like green snow around her black heels.

How is it that Rebecca could change from mild-mannered box sorter to foiler of financial larceny?  How had three of the area’s most successful bank robbers been converted into bodies to be tagged and bagged by the actions of her small shaking hands?  The eyes of the bank customers and staff were frosted with tears as they let out sighs of relief through smiling lips that thanked higher powers and luck.  Rebecca stared deliberately at the light gray grout on the floor and breathed heavily, her fingers caressing the trigger as she imagined folding out the bills for her father.  A single spent cartridge rolled into her view toward her toes catching on a flake of glass.

The S.W.A.T. team shattered the front door with a Toss Phone, a brick-like orange phone that professional negotiators throw to hostage takers so that they can talk on a secure line.  The phone slid across the safety glass pebbles knocking away the cartridge and stopping at her black shoes.  People in the bank recoiled at the noise and action but then continued to stand up and smile, clapping and murmuring that it was all over.  Rebecca dropped the nose of the heavy Beretta to point at the ground.  She awkwardly picked up the phone with both hands and started to look at its clean plastic shape.  Where a keypad should be, there was simply a green and a red button, TALK and END she imagined.  People were approaching her with outstretched arms reminding her of the same look that her father had during her first solo bike ride.  These strangers were finally noticing her as the third man had noticed her just before she ended his life.

She had snuck up behind the first man as he yelled at Bridgid, the pretty blond teller, her face held down severely on the counter with the shotgun pointing in her mouth.  Rebecca snatched the silenced pistol from the back of the man’s waistband, pointed the long end into the man’s ear and pulled the trigger.  The second robber had turned toward her with his shotgun leveled but never had a chance to turn completely in Rebecca’s direction.  The third man, however, had seen the whole thing needing only to turn his head.  This man could scarcely believe that Rebecca, the smallest of the many hostages and deemed to be the least threatening, was doing the impossible.  She saw disbelief in his face as his eyes darted to his two companions now laying motionless and unthreatening on the ground.  She saw all of the planning unraveling before his eyes.  He looked at her as one looks at a kitten the first time one feels the incision of their claws.  But beyond that, she could see that his entire life was now on fast forward from first memory through troubled youth and teenage years culminating in the most unlikely of scenarios and possible risks to health and longevity.  All of this she recognized in the moment it took for her to line up that third shot, for he was the farthest away and required the steadiest aim.  As her father had taught her, she lined the front aim point with the notched rear, the man slightly out of focus just before squeezing.  He gasped just as she squeezed, the small muffled explosion surprising her, the loud metal pipe sound as he dropped his shotgun, his body lurching with the impact.  His young face in a grimace of disbelief.  She knew she’d carry his asking expression in her mind forever.

The phone and the pistol started to shake in her hands as adrenalin flowed steadily through her.  Rebecca initially didn’t know what was happening with these three aggressive men and she had reacted almost without thinking.  But now she realized that it was a bank robbery.  She noticed everything around her; the edges of the glass chips reflecting the scuff marks on her black shoes, the sound of a policeman’s radio chirping outside, the footfalls of someone behind her.  The man’s face.  She had seen him before in the bank.  He was handsome and she had tried turning a certain way to get him to notice her but he was occupied with Bridgid as she showed him pamphlets and giggled.  Rebecca looked over at her.  She wasn’t giggling now.  She was standing as if she had just landed knee-deep into concrete.  There was a mist of red blood across her left cheek.  Rebecca normally admired her but now was wondering if she was in on this robbery?  She looked mouth agape at a space two feet in front of her above the ground, an emptiness she stared into with absolute fright.  The footsteps approached with the sound of wood on marble.  Rebecca’s vision shifted from sharp to blurry as if suddenly caught in a headwind.  She threw her arms up in front of her and wheeled around at the person approaching from behind.  Her finger felt the wet trigger guard and felt past its sharp edge to the spoon-like trigger, the spring behind it compressing as she squeezed.  Gillian stopped with a look of shock and raised her hands defensively in front of her face.  The shot penetrated Gillian’s hand and entered her throat with a hollow sound.  The two stared at each other. or more accurately, everyone stared at Rebecca as she pointed the gun at the redhead.  The orange Toss Phone and the gun were too heavy to hold like this for long and Rebecca’s arms ached and were visibly shaking.

All silence within the room was replaced with the rush of the ocean as Rebecca’s face turned to fire.  The edges of her vision darkened and she fell backwards into the abyss, Gillian far away now and getting smaller as if zooming a lens from telephoto to wide-angle.  Rebecca felt an overwhelming urge to sleep, but saw Gillian spit blood as she collapsed.  She then let it take her over as she felt all of her body’s strength leave her.  Her arms fell, then the gun and phone and her knees weakened and cracked and the world faded and snapped to black as her head met the ground.

______________________

The rain pulled at her sundress.  His eyes never left hers.  She said something about how he got the answer wrong, and how she died in that moment.  But after, she was never more proud of him.  ”I died when you died,” he said. She was speaking to the boy in the bank.  The third man she had shot.  He grabbed her shoulders and kissed her.  She said she didn’t want him to go but he left anyway.

At the train station, Rebecca clung to the idea that his return would weaken her, when she knew it would only make her stronger and more sure of her life’s direction.  She looked at the glass door of the bank often throughout the day half expecting and half fearing every young man’s resemblance to her beau.  She knew her memory of him was fading and the chances were slim that he even knew where she worked.  The copier was scraping the paper out of the tray so loudly now that the customers all turned whenever she used it.  She opened the lid and the green light illuminated the dust stuck permanently to the underside of the glass.  The fingerprints from the last technician who had come here were still there mocking her Windex and bathroom paper towel.  She wiped anyway until she saw her reflection crisply, his reflection looking dead as she gasped and yelled and jumped backwards closing her eyes.

She felt her body moving apart from her own strength.

She awoke in the back of a very small dimly lit room which shook and rocked and made whirring sounds of an ambulance interrupted by long beeps.  A pain in the back of her head and an uncomfortable sliver in the back of her hand like a shard of cold glass penetrated the fog of her awareness.  She tried to sit up but her head throbbed and her clothes seemed stuck to the narrow bed.  She opened her eyes again and looked at the paramedic who’s back was to her.  He was doing something with his hands.  She now realized that she was strapped down to a gurney.  The man spoke, “You awake now?”  She tried to find her voice but choked on a closed throat.  Her mind raced through the actions at the bank.  There was something at the end she couldn’t remember, a dark place.  The man turned with a needle held high in his hand.  It was the man with the shotgun.  ”Not for long,” he said as he moved into her filling her eyes with his face.

She screamed and woke in the hospital.  It was night.  There was an IV in her hand, the machine beeping that the bag needed to be changed.  The room was empty and large and the door was closed.  A closed circuit camera pointed at her through a black dome.  There were noises outside.  They sounded like demons, muffled and far away, angry and approaching on padded claws, fingernails clicking on the cheap vinyl flooring.  She looked around the room and saw the rain-soaked screen through the casement window.  Swinging her weak legs around, the sheets separated to let in the cold room air, her legs freezing solid with a thick coat of ice on the skin.  She grabbed a pair of scissors from the bedside table and stabbed at the ice to chip it away.  Large clear chunks fell to the ground and her legs slowly bent as they were freed.

The screen popped out of the frame with an exploding rattle, raindrops coating her arms.  Outside the building fell into fog with no ground in sight.  It was at least a story, but beyond that she couldn’t tell how far she would fall.  She cranked the casement window handle  trying to open it wider.  The opening was just wide enough for her small hips.  The door to her room swung in with a wheeze.  A doctor in a gray lab coat started for the bed but paused, the cop and orderly crashing in behind him.  He scanned the room and pointed to the window.  ”Stop her!”  The cop muscled around the doctor with something in his hands, a black box of some kind.  Rebecca felt the windowsill digging into her palms and legs.  She pushed herself, scraping past, letting gravity and wind take hold.

To be continued…

Tragedy, joy and all manner of experience befall the individual in the night, for what occurs under the purview of the moon can seldom be explained entire in the plain sight of the sun.  Is the night stronger?  Maybe the night isn’t stronger as much as we are weaker at night from being brought up to not fear the day.  Look at how we are taught…alleys are always dark and wet when they are sets for wicked deeds, the river’s journey is into the Heart of Darkness and the most baffling crimes shock the world when they are committed in broad daylight!  Or maybe experiences in the night are of a purer form than their sun gilt alternatives.  For example, take a moonlit walk with your girlfriend along the lake and stop by a white gazebo.  Sit her down on the stone seat and kneel before her.  Reach around her to turn on pre-positioned holiday lights which bathe you both in attractive warm tones which dance in the cool night breeze like candlelight.  Let her take your hand briefly enough to turn over the dark purple velvet box you are holding and open it to reveal a clear diamond shimmering in light and dark tones only possible during the contrasty night and see how far you get into your proposal speech before she jumps into your arms.  Then try the same proposal at high noon, after being at the beach, while hot, sweating, annoyed by the nearby beeping mid-day traffic on Lake Shore Drive, while the high sun emphasizes your worst features.  Chances are she’ll initially think about how your sci-fi books seem stupid when you talk enthusiastically about them, not about the slow dancing you did together in that unlit, roped-off ballroom at the Drake after dinner that one special night.

Plainly speaking, the world is flat.  The world traveler knows this when they taste the same oasis water separated by vast deserts.  Experience is experience is experience.  They are all the same.  The beauty (or tragedy) of them is beholden by the individual.  Your picture of that experience, or your poem, or painting or blog post serves only to prick certain sets of engrams which hopefully recreate the temperature and humidity conditions from which the clouds of memory originally formed in the viewer’s mind.  With luck, those clouds will respawn and rain down appreciation in the form of a “Like” or comment or $78.1 million purchase, as in the case of Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette.

And what source of subterranean magma does this cynicism erupt from?  Why, of course, it’s Love, Love, Love.  The search continues for my future, and yet the whole endeavor has the heft of a treacherous instrument in my hand, unbated and envenomed.  The foul practice turning itself upon me, I look at myself with the same false acumen as I use to judge other potential loves.  I feel like Conan having conquered his foes sitting upon his throne, a heavy gold crown weighing down his wrinkled brow, the future of his kingdom at risk for a mate and heir, the court jester making light of the situation as OKCupid shows me pictures of fair maidens from across the land.  Every night feels as of a full moon poisoned by a witch.  Whimsy and Consequence stay separated by the Peasant Dance.  Chance plays with its marionette strings.  The two dancers could meet if only the crowd could unconsciously conspire to allow it.  My heavy heart could grow wings and soar.  My self-image bridled by twenty-three past kisses could return to its brumby roots.

So why the night?  My dreams seem obscured by darkness, as if seeking them from the confines of a deep water submersible along the deepest trenches of the ocean.  All I see is my headlights dashing across featureless landscape.  And sometimes, by choice, I turn off those lights for a truth to be magnified by the noise in my brain, a Ganzfield effect showing me the way to go home.  If you were in a dark room with no light, how long would you have to stay in that darkness before you believed that the outside world had never existed or that home was no more than a state of mind rather than a tangible thing?  Sensory deprivation experiments prove that all of us hallucinate when faced with a consistently blank field.  And what is love if it isn’t a hallucination?

Well, after some time away I’ve started working on a few details on my mod for Arma2, Underwater Diving. I revised the diving computer and added and removed some features. It now times your dives, displays ambient water pressure, displays depth and records your maximum depth reached, indicates a dive ceiling where you need to wait to decompress (if needed), and it has oxygen toxicity bar graphs and nitrogen loading bar graphs. If you surface, the dive timer stops and restarts when to resume diving. Cylinder pressure is measured and Dive Time Remaining is displayed (which changes according to depth). The partial pressure of O2 and N2 are displayed and if you use a real world NOAA dive chart, it should be tell you how long you can dive at certain depths.  Also, if your partial pressure of oxygen (ppO2) or partial pressure of nitrogen (ppN2) rises to a dangerous level (O2) or a level that could lead to nitrogen narcosis quickly, the number changes to red.

So what does all of that mean? Well, you can use this addon as complicated or as easy as you want. If you want to learn how to scuba dive for real, this mod could help you get the basic concepts down. I’ve also included things like “unlimited air” and “arcade mode” which allow you to experience the sensation of these variables but without dying by doing something ill-advised like diving really deep and surfacing too quickly for your nitrogen level to decrease in your tissues or diving down to 300 meters on pure O2.

I’ve also created a D.E.A.D. which is a Diver Emergency Ascent Device.  This is something I discovered in my research on scuba diving and different safety devices available to the commercial and military diving community. You basically pull a cord and the life vest you are wearing inflates bringing you to the surface quickly. Of course, if you have reached a compression depth where you need to wait at 5 meters before surfacing, using the D.E.A.D. will cause you to get decompression sickness (DCS) also known as the bends. I still need to work on the speed of the ascent of this device, but that should be relatively easy to figure out.  Currently, you can rise from about 35 meters to zero meters in about 3-5 seconds, which is like a rocket.

Here’s the latest video I created showing off some of these new features.  If you’d like to follow the development of this addon, you can follow the forum posts on Armaholic or the BI Forums.