If an online journal is essentially a captain's log of an ocean voyage, then I'm here to tell you I've hit the doldrums.  There is no wind in my sails, the navigational charts somehow got wet and blurry, and the crew is tired of fish.

I'm looking for a tropical island with a sheltered bay to anchor in.  On the shore is a Mexican restaurant and a Chinese restaurant, each with internet connections and a Super Lotto machine.

*****

If an online journal is essentially a musical instrument, then I'm here to tell you I've lost my chops.  The embouchure is weak, the reed is dry, the mouthpiece cold.

I need to hang in a smoky room where some groovy cats are jammin', as we hep dudes say.  Gotta swing a little, pat my foot.

*****

Luckily, an online journal is neither of those things, but don't expect any definitive answer.  Today it's a playground, a tiny spot of electronic turf where I do a little turn and then move on, trying all the while to extract the lesson that I shouldn't take this as seriously as I do.

From time to time it seems as if a few of us who do this have achieved a synchronicity of malaise, much like women who, when in a close group, move toward a synchronicity of reproductive cycles, except in this case it's nonproductivity that is our common factor.

In a meeting the other night, I was trying to express my inability to express myself.  As I struggled to convey my rapidly declining verbal skills, I was at a loss for words.  My mouth didn't move right, my thoughts were several paces ahead of my tongue and my brain just locked up.  I actually resorted to teenage slang, and said "suck" three times within a single hour.  I know.  The horror.

Much of this fragmentation is caused by unprocessed emotion.  Among other things, there's a strong undercurrent of grief in my life, a process of coming to terms with the specifics of my own fatherhood and the line that runs through me from my father to my child.  There is rich ore in this mine, but it must be panned for.  Attention must be paid, to the mountain as well as the tiny grains I sift through.

This can mean only one thing: I need a huge vacation.

I will not get a huge vacation.

What will happen is I will try to make better use of my time so that I can focus on web-based photographic projects I have in mind.  I will defuse the negativity sparked by interruption by not considering it an interruption at all.  It will be just... life.  I will pretend I am young.  I will let sighing be enough, because out there, 'round the bend past Christmas, invisible, is this big chunk o' time with my name on it.  He said.  Sighing.  Then laughing.  Then sighing again.

This sort of frustration is the curse of focusing on the focus, with words, anyway.  Photographs, on the other hand, have a way of coaxing what's in the photographer's heart out onto an image, without the second-guessing or the syntactical logic.  The result is often more cathartic, and elegant as well.

It comes as no surprise then that it's time for a moratorium on verbal self-examination.  For the next while, what I'll do here is simply express, through images, whatever sticks to them as they go from my eye through a lens and onto a screen.  Words have been clutter, and it's time to clean house.

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