The usual blasphemy.

Let it be said, with considerable certainty, that I have never held a particularly strong belief in God, Allah, Jehovah, or whatever it is people refer to their supreme being of choice as these days.

I was raised in a Jewish household, but it was only Jewish in the capacity that there was a half-assed menorah for a little over a week in December. We, as a family, attended Temple only twice during my entire childhood, both times as a favor to a friend of my father's. My best memories of my family's short-lived piety was a moderately entertaining sermon, and then a speaker that bored me to tears. I left both times with no intention of returning for anything but business (I worked at temple as an arts and crafts assistant for a few years – but any real Jew will tell you that money is money).

I remained a borderline Jew for several years. I said my prayers before bed until I was roughly ten; blessing my meals before eating (if I even remembered the correct words in Hebrew) petered out around eleven. As I slacked on my religious obligations, I couldn't help but notice that the threatened repercussions of not honoring God had yet to show themselves. Like a willful toddler testing the limits of a permissive parent, I pushed the envelope.

My first forays into atheism were under the guise of humor. I wrote and drew comics, and in one of my stories, the main characters would burn fifty gasoline-soaked garbage bags, filled with aborted fetuses, on the front lawn of the Vatican (I know, right?). ("We baptize you with FIRE! SOULS FOR THE CHURCH! SOULS FOR THE FUCKING CHURCH!") I penciled the page, inked it, lettered the dialogue in, and sat back to await the impending lightning bolt.

Nothing.

It was at this point that I decided that, if there was indeed a God, he was failing miserably at impressing me... which I imagine would be really a very simple thing if he was all-powerful. He couldn't spare a single precious moment on his infinite calendar to nudge me back onto the Straight and Narrow? Curious. I'm certainly not hard to please; a burning bush on my nightstand would have been more than enough.

My sacrilegious cartooning continued, much to my parents' ire. My mother, most notably, attempted to tear the original pages of one of my more disrespectful works. Beyond that, no repercussions were visited upon me, much to my amusement.

My festering disbelief in God became full-blown upon my graduation from high school and enrollment in college. However, the school I've chosen to attend is occasionally rife with Christian activity. It reached a point with a mostly-unobtrusive, but very unnecessary, older man with a sign reading: “JESUS LOVES YOU!!!!!!!!!!”, or something to that effect. There may have been more exclamation points.

And it makes you wonder... what sort of belief system needs badly-drawn cardboard signs and persistent men insisting that Jesus is your savior? It's absurd. The culture surrounding religion, the restrictions, the mindsets, the intolerance, the unwavering conviction that they are RIGHT – I want no part of that. I want to learn about the universe and all of its histories and possible inconsistencies and not swallow the “shit, man, God went and dunnit” explanation.

Fox News ran a program (contradictorily) titled "Facts, Faith, and Miracles.” The program attempted to explain the talents of great scientists, artists, and composers through "God." As in, their ability was so mind-boggling great that only "God" could be behind it.

My mother happened to be watching it at the time. I told her that the program was an insult to those great achievers and their ability because it was blatantly not giving them credit for their accomplishments, for the brilliance of their minds, and instead insisting, with absolutely no consideration or basis of intelligence, that it all must be attributed to a mysterious, disembodied force that “blessed” them. It sickened me.

I choose to believe in people and their ability to achieve amazing things and come to “moral” (whatever the shifting standard for that may be at the time) decisions not based on fear of an eternal punishment, but on their own thinking and reasoning. (Most) humans are fully capable of this. I do believe that religion is an insult to those who follow. It's an insult to their own independence and their own ability. Very recently someone on my Facebook friends list updated her status: "_____ got an A on her history test and is thanking God for His help!" I can't even begin to understand how that is not insulting one's mind. Your knowledge and your hard work got you that A -- not an invisible "being." It's undermining your own ability by willingly bestowing credit on someone/thing else. Respect yourself, jeeesus.

Sure, these may be slight or even insignificant reasons to fully reject a social paradigm, but trust me, I have countless more reasons for not having faith. It's a matter of listing them all.

*To my religious friends who I might (...probably) have offended: There will be opposition to anything you or I say, always. It hardly matters who says it.

*This might be kind of a circlejerk, yeah.

*P.S. RAmen, his Noodly Appendage.

fell out

The stars don't shine any differently in your presence. The dark waves of the water don't move any differently if your arm is around me, and the fog we saw would dissipate eventually. Your arm will leave my shoulders, your smile will leave your face, and your eyes will stop looking into mine. Everything is eventual and this is only a time game. The trees we saw move were only standing still, and the city lights were only sleepless office buildings. The blanket of the night sky was only an absence of light. It was all only an absence of light. [They say the speed of light is the fastest, but why, then, is darkness always there to meet it first?]

The stars stopped shining, and your arm slid off my shoulders. Your fingers left the tangled mess of my hair and your eyes drifted downwards toward your shoes. You aren't smiling anymore, and the trees are standing still. The water is creeping towards where we sit and eventuality is here.

It's here, love. Love, it's gone.

(But it does not matter, because you will never read this anyway.)

Dear Diary

I once had this little notebook. It was flawlessly bound, its color inviting, and the leather cover was just barely wrinkled, as if it had already seen its share of words. Its pages were pristine; once I picked it up I could not help but run my fingers and eyes along its delicate lines that called out for words—-my words. And so I would sit at the edge of my chair and hold this lovely, empty book in my hands, hour after hour. Each day the ritual clawed at the edges of my mind until I sat at my desk, poised, pen in hand and notebook squarely in front of me, open to the first page. It was always the first page, always. It was always open, taunting me. Its blue lines, devoid of meaning but saturated with potential, shifted and blurred as my palms gathered damp, expectant sweat. And still, nothing happened.

I even tried to rid myself of this pretty notebook by burying it under layers and layers of mundane assignments, hoping to ebb its spell. But to no avail -- every night before surrendering to sleep I would dig it out again, pen in hand, determined to spill strings of eloquent phrases onto its perfect pages, as intricately woven as the bindings themselves. The notebook waited.

On lazy days when the sun was perpetually low in the sky and the neighborhood children came outside to play, I would lie on my back, examining the cracks in the ceiling for that idyllic concoction of words I’d been scavenging my brains for. This special little notebook didn’t deserve just any regular teenage journal entries; its faultless, unmarred sterility warranted more than adolescent love affairs and trivial dramas. How I yearned to swirl and drag and whip my pen across those pages with linguistic grace, philosophical paradigm. And no matter how still, how tantalizingly stagnant I lay on my back all those lazy days, the words just wouldn’t come.

To write is to be passionate, and to be passionate is to feel. Surely I felt the tangibility of cracked leather, of the deceptively smooth paper and its angry white hue. I could even smell the raw, factory-borne essence of consumerism. In my head I knew the masked seductive appeal could be attributed to clever manufacturing—a ploy for selling a mixed blessing. And that’s all it is, was what I said to myself. But I couldn’t find the logic to disguise that I felt inferior to a damn notebook.

The act of writing itself is haunting. Words become intermingled with words, and thoughts glide over one another until everything becomes a glorious hum without context or meaning. As if every idea passes through at the exact moment and I am overcome with the wonderful sense of understanding without ever comprehending a single thing.

Months trailed after weeks of this stalemated creativity match until the irony of the entire situation tickled me cruelly. It was my 10th grade English teacher who first picked up my old, battered spiral journal with distaste and said, “You should use a pretty, bound diary instead of this old thing; it’ll help your writing.” Her manicured nails a stark contrast to the torn cardboard cover of my nearly-filled spiral, she set it aside, shaking her head as if unable to grasp the notion of anyone using such a dull journal.

I still had my old friend somewhere, abandoned for its plainness. Its warm comfort and lenient expectations dispersed to give way for the immaculate prestige of my new leather notebook, forgotten. It was then that I brought it out again, apologetic tension coupled with guilt still fresh. The red cover may have been adorned with stray pen marks, the corners may have been curling inward, but inside were the thoughts I sought after all this time. The trivial dramas were there in their entirety, interlaced seamlessly like silk with the keenest observations of the world around me. The disjointed notes and rhythms of the neighborhood children’s voices, the elegance of the rose growing outside my window, the summer breeze that stirred my perceptions into one vast realization: it was all here. Beneath this worn cover of not cardboard but love, were the ideas I lived by.

I once had a little notebook. It was bound with words.

don't panic.

"The beauty of falling in love is just a shortcut for the beauty of falling into life. It’s that moment where we believe we’ve found something new in the world, when what we’ve really found is the world and ourselves actually living within it. The screen splits between reality and expectation, and I continue to be brought back down to reality, to my own words and devices. Sometimes imagination is more personal than life and it took me almost two years to realize, to say - yes, sometimes. But it shouldn’t be. We have the control to make our lives transcend our imaginations, to make our realities so much more beautiful, so much more personal than our expectations. I have that control (and so do you)."

On Buttons

“What’s wrong today?”

“I’m sad.”

“About what?”

“About everything. About the inconsistent weather that rains of bipolarity, about the stray cats living outside or doorstep that we never feed, about the scarves I wear on warm summer days –"

She cuts me off.
“What use is it being sad about these inconsequential things?”

“What use is it being neutral towards them?”

“What else are you sad about?”

“Ignorance and petty misunderstandings. Torn shoelaces on new sneakers. Broken eyelashes that cling to your cheeks. Rolled up sleeves and too-short jeans, long jackets and polka-dotted dresses. Fringed hair that hides Michael’s eyes so I can’t tell what he’s thinking. Chipped nailpolish and cheap hotel signs, blinking with faulty efficacy. No one caring. No one caring about the broken-in soles of white flip-flops on the beach and the sand between Grandma’s toes. Why does no one care?”

“Why do you care so much?”

“The world is collapsing around my neck and suddenly I can’t breathe.”

“You mean your shoulders?”

“No… I mean my neck, what’s connecting my mind to my body. The bridge is severed there and neurons fire preoccupation, neon store lights and lost pawn shops. I tell myself I don’t care but the world tightens its grip around my neck and suddenly everything is in bright, vivid color again, reflecting off of cheekbones and materializing in dreams.”

“But if it’s only a dream…”

“What will you do when the subconscious becomes the button on your sleeve; what will you do when gravity tears it off and you can’t find a replacement in a small plastic ziplock bag, no string in the package and no button in sight?”

“Sew.”

“You’ll sew these materialized dreams back together, you’ll scribble nonsensical verses and stage cues, but all the world’s a stage and your buttons are the actors and you’ll know the lines but won’t know the emotion to act them out.”

“Why are you so contradictory… stop…”

“Contradictions do not exist. A is A. It’s as simple as that, but when you put your hat on backwards B becomes A and life isn’t so clear anymore, with your bill facing backwards and your eyes facing the front.”

Detox

She tells me about the theory of evolution, on our front porch, three fingers tightening around her wine glass. She tells me how we evolved from apes and how we will continue evolving, so I ask, what are we evolving to? and she doesn't answer, only traces her fingers along the neck of that glass as she has so many others.

I wait, I look at her intently and drink in every detail on her flowered dress, study the folds and creases and imperfections in the fabric. She takes a long sip, the dark red staining her lips, and shakes her head at me: you've no need for such valant doubts, she says to me as she has so many other times.
She tells me I think too much, and I tell her she feels too much.
Our stalemated silence continues, plods along, save for the momentary scraping of fingers against glass.

It's a nice day. And as we're sitting here, and as rare an occurance as this is, I'm fatally aware not of life, not of evolution nor apes, neither the glass or the wrinkles in printed fabric roses.
Somehow I'm aware of the separation of living things.
Our knees touch, pushed together by the narrowness of the cement steps, but we're so far apart-- her dashing, darting grey eyes and my still, frozen green ones-- we see each other; we've lost each other.

She looks away and concentrates on the shallow pool of red at the bottom of her glass and the telling translucent paths on the sides.

I'm vaguely aware of the separation of my own body and mind on this lovely, calm June day. And I wonder how she doesn't notice my mind sauntering away from the porch and my body doing abstract cartwheels to the brink of deterioration, straight into the woods behind our house; I consider the futility of it all: the porch meeting, the flower print dress, the cartwheels, evolution, the somber combination of eyes. But not the vanishing pool of red.

I lick my lips and know what it tastes like, how it feels, how it courses down the throat in a trail of false tranquility. I know this, I know this a hundred times, and I yearn for my detached body to cartwheel to the cellar and drown itself in what I know, and what I still want to understand. I want my mind in those back woods, away.

We sit on the front porch and she tells me of science, of mathematics, and of the brilliance of minds unmarred.
I add the fine, green Italian bottles, divide by the fights, multiply by the detached apprehension, and subtract the brilliance.

We sat on the front porch for an hour. She asked me what I was thinking of again and I didn't reply and she just shook her head.
"Pretty soon the world's gonna throw you off its back," she told me, letting go of her glass and placing it with three fingers on the step below.
"Pretty soon."

So here's why.

I miss photography. It only struck me some time ago that this is my first year in college and I'm 19 years old, a legal adult, able to buy lottery tickets and smoke cigarettes that I can't afford. It hit me that I was throwing my life away into chemistry textbooks and perfect GPAs while losing sight of what kept me going all this time - photography. Art. Creativity. Real-deal passion.

I guess you could say that I've finally woken up and grown some balls and realized for the millionth -- and last -- time that I can't let go of the camera and can't stop looking through the viewfinder. It's a part of me just as much as any body part; taking the camera off from around my neck is like amputating an arm; replacing it with a textbook is like feeling phantom pains.

Time's going by way too fast and there are so many opportunities to explore, ground to make up.

As my favorite photographer and greatest inspiration, Jerry Uelsmann, said, "Ultimately, my hope is to amaze myself. The anticipation of discovering new possibilities becomes my greatest joy."