The barrista tossed the box of stirring straws into the air and squealed like an animated piglet as it just missed the whirling ceiling fan. She must be jacked on the feine I thought to myself. I was sucking down chai (decaf) during her performance before meeting ND at the Himalayan Kitchen for some web stuff. Ironic, since they have the best chai in the four corners, that I was getting it at the Steaming Bean instead. Over the years of pounding multi-shot espresso drinks and half-a-tanker of coca cola my body has said "absolutely no" to any more caffeine. If I even try to drink decaf coffee I nearly spin out of control and get the ugly visit from the migraine man in the morning. It took me years to figure out it was the caffeine.

I guess, like any addiction, it hides deep within you, masked by escuses and undecipherable urges. I thought I had altitude sickness, a tumor, alzheimers... anything but an addiction. I remember one camp trip with a group of forest activists. We were up there for several days and by the second morning i was in excruciating pain. I lay in my bag with my eyes covered getting up only to puke all over the wildflowers every 45 minutes. Several of my friends grew concerned when they saw me, green in color and drenched in cold sweat. One tried to use Reiki on me and I told her to keep her filthy little hands away from my chakras, I was going to die anyway. Years later I can tell you for sure that it was caffeine withdrawal that was cramping my usually cheerful and clownish style.

Since bailing on caffeine my life has reached a nice steady flow. Yah, I do miss the taste of hazelnut coffee mixed with nearly equal amounts of sugar and half an half but all I have to do is remember the pain it put me through and I'm ok skipping it. Clarity has come back to my life and the "hypoglycemia" I thought I was suffering from is gone along with the whacky mood swings and hundred-mile-an-hour rants.

Do yourself a favor and leave the caffeine in the beans on the plantation floor before it bitch slaps you into the reality that it is a powerful drug.

What i'm thinking....

As i sit here wondering what to spew onto this page about myself, the fog lifts on a small dark corner of my brain. The dank, musty corner that realizes what i am and how all of this is playing out. A few years ago, let's just say about 15 sets of 365 days in the past, i realized what my job was and it frightened me. While processing a batch of 10 rolls of 36 exposure t-max 400 pushed to 3200 in hc-110, my mind reeled. Maybe it was the chemistry wafting up into my nasal cavities and seeping through my blood brain barrier, but i had the intense realization that what i did was make little pieces of plastic. Everything about photography in my early phase was plastic and chemicals. So here i am, working at a newspaper, huffing vast quantities of cyanide gas (stop bath and potassium ferricyanide don't play well together) realizing my job is to stick time onto these plastic slices in some sort of orderly fashion. The horror of working in a factory, methodically stamping out formula based images made me cringe, but i got over it and shot more plastic till plastic turned to nothing.

Now, in this digital age, i sit with a bunch of nothing on dvd's, staring at another piece of plastic and pushing pixels around with non-existent "tools" till the vessels in my eyes start to seep. And through those burning eyes, those portals into the bad-sectored, read-write media that is my brain, i see it. I see what i've been seeing all along. IT, US, WE. We are all just trying to exist on this, thinly dusted-with-life globe that spins in this vast 2nd grade classroom we call the universe. We wake up, dust off the night and step boldy out onto this pin-prick of a planet as it whirls like a top through so much nothing. Dancing like ballerinas unaware of the stage, it just seems so ridiculous, I just have to make pixels of it, and share it. And hopefully make a living of it. So i too can spin like a top till my spin is gone and someone else gets to bleed from the eyes as they sift through the plastic and pixels of my life or just toss it in the recycling bin and let someone else take the spin.

I can't see myself doing anything else, i've tried and i've come full circle back into the loving arms of photography.