September 2021
**A Beautiful Diamondback**
Last night Marci wakes me up saying there’s something right out our bedroom window making noise and it woke her. I couldn’t figure it out, and in my drowsy state I thought crickets, or a new hatch of something. I got dressed and went outside, and the first thing I see is the reflective eyes of our cat. Then I follow the noise to a beautiful, big, very agitated diamondback rattlesnake. He had been constantly rattling for a half an hour at least, and he had a lot of rattles. It was a beautiful sound. I recorded it with my phone and some professional recording equipment. I got a big trash can and put him in it and now he lives a few miles away. I've posted him on my Instagram account, if you want to see him or hear the sound.
**Hello My Friends**
It has been a fun editing and going through all these images of 33 years of photographs in Big Bend for my retrospective book. I have a weird brain. I can meet someone and in 10 minutes forget their name, but when I go through these contact sheets and images I can remember what the day felt like, my mindset, and my emotional feelings at the time. It’s not always pleasant, but most of the time it is. After I was finished going through the first edit I thought to myself, let me dig deeper, back to the 70’s, and see if I can find images that were seedlings or hints of a future style. I know they are in there, and I know of a couple of images right off the bat. But as I started to look at those old contact sheets and see my 21 year old self, and my family and friends of that time I put them back in the box and away. I couldn’t bare going through those feelings again. There’s a young artist I follow on Instagram, and she always seems a little sad and struggling, and sometimes she reveals more than I care to know, and much more than I would personally ever say on social media. I believe she must be in her 20’s. Sometimes I would find myself rolling my eyes at her admissions, but then I think about myself at that age, and it was really difficult figuring out what I was going to do with my life, how I was going to earn an income. I had not found Big Bend, and it would be another decade before I did. My whole life and creative career in front of me. It was the emotional angst I think we all go through to get to the thing that gives our life meaning. If you are fortunate to find it, you embrace it. While I wish I still had that 20’s energy, I would rather have my fingernails pulled out with pliers than go through those emotions again.
Happy Full Moon. Get Outside.