Jeremiah Tolbert

I had a very long week at work this past week, so most of my week­end was devoted to very low energy pur­suits.   I read a lit­tle, watched some TV, saw Quantum of Solace (okay, but not as good as the last one) and played the demo of Left 4 Dead, Valve’s new Zombie Survival Co-​​op game (fan­tas­tic so far and I can’t wait to play the full game).  More than half of today was devoted to mak­ing a prop for tomorrow’s Roundbottom photo, and then shoot­ing.   The newest post should be pretty amus­ing, even if it’s not the most meaty thing I’ve writ­ten lately.  After this, I’m tak­ing a 2 week hia­tus to attempt to build up some mate­r­ial and think about what I really want out of this project.

Lately, I have felt like I have to make a choice between writ­ing and photography–that I only have enough time out­side of my job to really mas­ter one of these two pur­suits.  It’s prob­a­bly not true, but I know that I split my ener­gies among too many things.  I was feel­ing okay about maybe dip­ping my toe back into the writ­ing waters, espe­cially after see­ing a great review of the Seeds of Change antholo­gies.  And then I saw some com­ments on a site about some of my work that was pretty bru­tal, and I lost what lit­tle moti­va­tion I had.

Until I can find a rea­son to write that can stand up to the whims of Joe Random Internet Commenter, then it’s best that I not do any writ­ing.   This is one of the things I like about pho­tog­ra­phy.  If peo­ple don’t like your pho­tog­ra­phy, they rarely say any­thing.  If they like it, they do.  But when it comes to fic­tion, peo­ple seem to be com­pelled to tell you at length just how much you suck. It prob­a­bly has some­thing to do with the time invest­ment it takes to con­sume a story vs look at a photo.

Sometimes I think that my pho­tog­ra­phy would get bet­ter if it was cri­tiqued to the same degree my fic­tion has been, but then, neg­a­tive comments–comments of any sort–don’t really count as cri­tique.  And maybe some of the fun of pho­tog­ra­phy would be drained if I took it that seriously?

Earlier, I went for a pho­towalk down by the river to clear my head and just be in the now.  Lately, I am too busy think­ing and the nature of my work doesn’t allow for me to get into the now very often.  By “the now” I mean, the groove,  the flow, what­ever.  A state of being and doing, where time is mean­ing­less and the ego slips beneath the sur­face.  I took a few decent shots, and stum­bled upon a bunch of beaver chews.  I walked up and down the area look­ing for the dam, but I couldn’t find it.  I will prob­a­bly go back the next time I want to take a walk and see if I can spot it.  It was very nice.

When I think about how plea­sur­able it is to go on a pho­towalk or take pic­tures in gen­eral, I won­der why I can’t have that much fun writ­ing any­more.  At some point, it stopped being about fun and started being some­thing else.  God knows I value my leisure time like it’s made out of dia­monds since my Dad died, so maybe I take writ­ing so seri­ously because I don’t want to waste anyone’s leisure time with crap writ­ing.  Ahem.  Which I sup­pose I am kind of doing right now.  I com­mand you not to read this unless you are steal­ing time from your employer!

There, I feel better.

One day I am going to look back at all the time I have spent ago­niz­ing over all this and I’m going to be angry at myself for not just shut­ting up and doing some­thing.  I used to tell peo­ple that the key to writ­ing was to “shut up and write” but I’ve got­ten awful at fol­low­ing that par­tic­u­lar advice.  But not tonight–I’m too tired to be angry with myself about it.