Tech disaster.
Why o why is the epinw OKcounter suddenly askew. The people who made the skin for it are in Korea and their site is a bramble patch of demi-English and demi-Korean = a challenge for sure.
Online at Middling City U in a quadrant of the library I thought was reserved for collections searchers. How utterly wrong I am for this is, unbeknownst to me as of 15 minutes ago, The Gratis Online Centre. So what if it's on a crappo Dell pc with blindingly wiggly-jiggly screen that seems to be in green-o-vision. Hey, I like green a lot but this screen is making me feel sea sick.
Heading out to Toxicville to perhaps acquire some holiday gifts and cheer for others.
Time to head north.
Time to sign off.

No love for Toxicville.

Today has been one Perfect, well-balanced day of excellent freelance gigs of a photo nature, of interesting people and so engaged was I with photo subject numero uno that we talked for over an hour which floated by in a freeform, coffee-fueled blip. This is one thing I most dig about my life: I get assignments, I arrange, I arrive, I engage, I shoot, I leave. This first subject was an MD associated with Middling City U, a dog lover, and we shared political views. She asked about me, she asked if I had met Maureen Dowd. I said Not yet. And I mean it. This woman doc knows Dowd and was suggesting that I do meet her, that she become my mentor of sorts. I have just purchased Are Men Necessary?, her new book, inspired by not only her but a profile of her in VF so this was more fortuitousness in today's numero uno meeting. And, when I explained how her directions via email first landed me in the wrong parking lot and then the wrongo buildingo she asked if I'd ended up at Middling City Morgue. I replied NOOO, but I'd like to. To much concurrent mirth and amazement by numero uno and her colleague. I explained that I've always been intrigued by the MCM, that I had a college photo colleague who made work in there, heads in buckets and that sort of thing. I have no apparent desire to make work of heads in buckets (although I have photographed Buckethead, but that's another story completely) but do have that Mutteresque/Witkinesque thread in me.
Photo subject number two today was a hard case, an arms-crossed crank until I worked my Perfect magique upon him, ending our photo engagement with laughs and such. At one point when I was making images of him, posed in the midst of a complab of sorts, a frat boy shouted out Hey X, what's all this. To which I replied on his behalf... Swimsuit Edition, SI. This kind of shocked my subject. And to that I say Oh, velcro.
Between and around these things were social and shop engagements and at one point I was checking out at a bookstore, minding mine own beeswax when the clerk asked if I'd like any gift receipts. Gift receipts, I questioned back at her, NO, these are all for me - the holidays are not JUST for others. (In keeping with the holiday shopping theory of Yours Truly that one should not forget oneself in the throes of heartfelt and pressurized holiday acquisition. My solemn decree reads as such: Yeah, sure, buy for those others but treat yourself, you deserve it and will enjoy the holidays oso much more when you're in those new duds, having arrived at the holiday soiree having just listened to some shiney new music, spritzed-up with some new fab scent... and the like.)
A parting holiday shot is this.
Every part of the year we should remember, recall our friends, acquaintances, family, helpers, etc. and the faux sense that all is heightened or that the sense of giving is enlarged now is shit. Be generous with your heart and time and money all the time. This is a time of pandemics, war, desultory vibes and no person in your life should be taken for granted. All through the year, not just Now in this fabrication of joy, love, bon vivant espousal.
And with this, I virtually hug You and speed off to a holiday party for writers for the Shiney Happy Mag, the annual throw the freelancer writer tipplers a festive little bone.

Festive bones of Love.

O happy happy, snap-happenstanced day.
A new Johnny Depp movie.
Well, the good news is it hits screens in the Shiney Apple and I know how to get there and the bad side of the news is it will probably not land in the Middling City.
The movie is The Libertine and the good news, again, is that he's in the damned thing, a biopic type of film about 17th C writer/poet/libertine/sex addict John Wilmot (so on-screen imagine he didn't have to think Mynameis Mynameis because it's handily one and the same).
The bad, again, is that like in that thuggish movie about blow he'll get all ugly at the end and word on the street is his character lost and loses his nose via some bad molecules that entered his libertine body.
Chronicler of the times Sam Johnson said he 'blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness.' Let this be a lesson to You. Or a touchstone for some remorse or even still some cause for tales of the ol' glory days.

Libertine love.