how utterly depressing

... to be alone on such a day! The shopping malls are closed early, so you can't even window-shop or just have a quiet walk. The theaters are also closed early so you cannot hide inside a cinema. Everything is dark and empty, save for a few tiny restaurants that nobody knows about, so they are completely empty also.

Sat in the parking lot of a closed but lighted Safeway grocery store, and laughed as I saw in just 30mins more than 15 people drive up, park and walk to the closed entrance. There were three cars in the parking lot! Nobody could be seen within the store!! They still tried to open the doors and finally walked across the street to Walgreens - a drugstore!! What will they buy in a drugstore that they wanted to buy originally in a grocery store?

What a sad day if you're not married, or don't have any close friends as is normally the case in this very virtual world. Fake friends who only want you for friendship to go drinking together.... drunk friends aren't real friends, they are people who will try to get you addicted to alcohol are trying to get you killed or worse.... Thank goodness traffic homeward was very very light. I counted the number of cars encountered/seen while driving 20mins to be less than 10 - and not one weaving crazy driver in sight!

Ah christmas: such cheer, such happiness and such sharing. If you have a family or a significant other.......

Now, what about the homeless? Those emergency teams and individuals who work? Soldiers separated from friends and family in places where people want them dead and gone.....

Oooooh, what happiness!!!

cleaning out my old sent box - my life in emails

It's not easy seeing where your Life has been - no better method of "seeing" its direction but through cleaning out your old emails in your sent box. Seeing emails dated while living in Spain, later emails upon my arrival in Eugene were a revelation; even more those emails after my move to the Bay Area.

Then I've reading through the other stuff.... emails to models hoping {begging} for a foto session and being refused. People and others who posed for others of lesser abilities photographically, and never posing with me. Models who were excited about an upcoming foto session with me, and never showed up... flakes who were just like snowflakes... appeared from seemingly out-of-the-sky, then disappeared and with just a few words here and there, gone as if they never existed. Others who even bragged about their opportunity with me - called me an artist - and were so "looking forward" to my photographing them... they too like leaves on a dying tree.... fell and disappeared.

Virtual letters from people whom I knew to be ~ thought I ~ good friends and then disappeared without a trace when I moved to the USA. Friends that were and later friends I knew and had, but no longer... never without a reason. Thy just died virtually and left no forwarding soul to contact.....

Yes, that and this now has been my life... sad and depressing. I don't know how many times I've been told that they "love my imagery and can't wait to be photographed by such an artistic artist" and then I never hear from them again... It's depressing when this happens on such a routine basis that one wonders if the life they are supposedly living is real.... or not.

I got upset before - not any longer - when I see someone whom I wanted to photograph - pose for someone else. I don't have any money to pay models and I get turned down by any and everyone. Yes, quite sad but who cares.... they have their life and don't care about how I feel.... later I'll see through their modeling website that they had posed free for some other photographer, who had/has less vision than I... the pictures being little less than studio snapshots a 5th grader could've snapped, or nudes so horrid who but an idiot would display them? But they do and they have...

I remember once a "friend" - no longer as she abandoned me too - wanted me to do a portrait for her.... bragged to all her friends and family of this upcoming portrait session with me. Months later I saw her casually on the street and asked what had happened with that need for a portrait.... she just shrugged and said she went to a studio and had them done. I asked if she liked the results and she told me no, then proceeded to describe each and every little detail of WHY she didn't like them. I told her she shouldn't be telling me as I was not her photographer - she should tell that studio.... she stomped off and I never saw her again.

Now it's difficult to talk to people about my photography - I am always wondering: will they be like the rest and just say things that are nice, but the truth is.... they will disappear like the others....

It happens so often....

I've often wondered should I give up this hate/love relationship with photography ~ how I love photography but it and the people who see my work hate me and my images so much as to avoid me so. I remember how some people would stare at me as they would a fly when I told them I was an "artistic" photographer; after a few days they were awed as they described how they felt so together with the beauty I had "captured". They were agasp when I told them I made very little money from my photography..... they too promptly disappeared as do the others.

As I write this, my camera is again in the shop for the same problem it's had three previous times over the past few months and I haven't even had it a whole year! Have previously tried to stay away from a camera, but tis difficult because it's like chopping off your hands, your feet and walking blind into the darkness....

But they don't care.... I feel so bitter at times but who cares.... to go begging online to create pictures for someone.... If I had the money to pay for a model they would probably still turn me down.... I am "so" artistic they don't see how I feel when they turn me down and go to some other less-experienced photographer. They don't see my hurt when I see their newest cheesecake pictures taken by some guy with a camera who does his work more to see nude women than anything else, and makes more money in one day through his photography than I have made in the last five years.

They don't care how I feel.....

Right now I am listening to flamenco guitar music off the internet, listening to the spanish-style music all day and wishing I were back in my small apartment in warmer friendlier Spain... not restricted within a cell of so many feet and with no room for my clothes, my things and my memories. That I must relocate things each and every day just to be able to move around and do things ~ for that reason often I cannot find things.

This is not Life......

well, you've done it again!

My next followup appointment with the eye clinic for my new eyes is next week but I have already called to have it rescheduled for tomorrow, so again I drive to San Jose.

While shooting the sunset the other night, aside from staring straight into a brighter-than-BRIGHT sphere with NO haze, fog or clouds as a filter, the usual happened as always, but later that same night and this morning I noticed that my camera viewing eye (left eye) will not focus clearly. Until that sunset the eye was progressing well and I could see sharply but that isn't the case this morning.

As that eye is very important for my photography, I want it checked soon and to determine any damage.... actually it feels like someone punched me in the eye, which I also did by accident the previous day but luckily it hasn't left any bruising.

I know what anyone ~ nobody but a few handful reads this blog anyway ~ would think: that I am already ruining my eyes and these are the new improved ones! But how can anyone stay away from any blinding gorgeous sunset?

Put yourself in my position: not happy at an unexpected event in my family situation which resulted in my moving to SF. To not have any friends in this new place and to be always working at moving out (heavy) stuff of a deceased person, a seemingly never-ending task. To not have any personal income so at least I can do more than I am now, and not available to work for several reasons I won't go into here. To have so much of my personal stuff inside a tiny room - not bigger than a small bathroom with an adjoining closet and walkway, serving as my bedroom, computer room, living room and dining room, and not to forget a storage area for my stuff from Spain and Eugene.... and still with stuff remaining of that deceased person ~ everything in one spot, but with so much stuff there simply isn't room for everything, yet not having the money to send my stuff not needed here to my apt in Spain.

Photography is my only "form" of relaxation or enjoyment. It earns me so little money that I would be sleeping on the streets ~ and that has happened even recently ~ that people ask me why I haven't given up doing something that is worthless to me as a paying profession. There's not much else I do or can do here with my limited funds, all of which goes to pay my spanish mortgage of which the world financial situation is not helping at all right now. I lose so much money it's not funny and is actually quite depressing.