Rust aesthetic!!

As you know, I'm not one to boast about my own photos.

That's crass.

I'd much rather invite (request? demand?) you to praise them. See, it's a win-win proposition. After you do the praising you feel good for your evident good taste, and I'm pleased to find out you have such finely honed artistic sensibilities.

See? You demonstrate your brains, and I demonstrate (yet again!) my humility.

Sweet.

But let me beat you to the punch just this once. That second photo--man, that's something else, isn't it? I especially like the scratch marks in the top-right quadrant. What caused them? (No, not a possum!) You'll never know what caused them, and you're okay with that. And I am too, but still something caused them, didn't it? I'm still a believer of cause and effect as a basic category for understanding the universe. I don't know whether at at the end of the day cause and effect actually squares with reality, but I don't see how (or why) to do away with the category for now. The phrase "$h*t happens" sort of implies the ultimate lack of causality in the world. Things just sort of happen. Or maybe it just means that one shouldn't try to look for meaning or some sort of justification for that event. It's a background fact--now just deal with it and move on.

I had a friend write me in response to one of my recent blog post, "I do differ with you on the interpretation of the verse that you cited. I don't read it as "all things happen for good." I read it as "good can come of all things, however bad." I don't think that the good has to justify the bad, and it often does not... examples seem endless."

I like that: the good not justify the bad, and it's not that all things happen for good. But bad need not have the final say.

I'm down with that. Very nice.

The other morning I told my pastor that I love disrepair. Then I got kind of freaked out for having said that. First of all, it's weird to think that I "have" a pastor. But let's be honest: they do come in handy. Not only because they are professional confessors (which is pretty much awesome, as I love to confess my sins), but also because someone needs to eulogize you when you die, and who wants to burden a friend or family member with such things?

I can imagine what some poor sap would have to say at mine:

"Well, we surely all have our favorite memories of him. I admit I'm struggling a little here because most of my stories about him involve him making noises, and I'm not good at making noises. Plus, I don't know whether it's appropriate to make noises at a funeral even if I'm doing it in honor of him--and he really liked noises. It's a hard call. He was sort of like that--the kind of guy who would make giving a eulogy really hard.

That's something. Kinda.

Umm... he had this great squirrel noise. Ha ha. Pretty funny. Pretty pretty pretty funny.

Yes. Pretty funny. I think you had to be there.

Oh, and once he cracked us all up when he made this great cormorant call. We all doubted whether it was a real cormorant or whether he just liked to make a noise and then say it was a "cormorant call." But he was insistent. So we stopped arguing about it. But dang it all, if I didn't check out a tape from the library on bird noises and, guess what, he just made that noise up. It wasn't a cormorant noise.

And here he is dead. I'm not saying that that's justice. I'm just saying that he made that up about the cormorant. And he did lie.

But that doesn't mean we're happy he's dead. We did like his noises. But I don't know why he had to lie about them. He was kind of like that in a lot of ways. He made bird noises and then got huffy denying that he made them up. When we all know that he made them up. I dunno.

Anyway, I'm sure you have your own stories, so I guess I should sit down and let someone else come up and say something they remember about him."

I say let a professional handle the job, and pastors are professional BIG EVENTS people. They're good at it. Thank goodness.

I know I would be terrible at giving a eulogy, unless you want your surviving peeps to hear a faithful cormorant call. In which case I'm just the person you're looking for.

It's also fun to have a pastor because pastors can be very pastoral. You can tell them all sort of stuff, and that's their job--to listen. Frankly I think I would find this veyr challenging. Not the withholding judgment part. The listening part. And the "not competing" part.

If I were a pastor:

"So Pastor MB, I just feel terrible about what I did, and I don't feel like I can get my head on straight until I face what I did squarely."

"Wait wait wait. Hold it there. Let me get this straight. THAT'S what you came to talk to me about?! That's your big sin? Dude, I sin more in my sleep than that. You think THAT'S a sin, listen to this..."

They discourage that kind of thing at pastor school.

I would not make a good pastor, so that good protestant doctrine should be recast as the priesthood of most believers.

As I was saying, I'm drawn visually to disrepair. Shiny new and symmetrical things can be mesmerizing fo sho. And a really fine photographer (not me) can make such new and shiny things look beautiful. I don't know how they do that. I'm not drawn to them. Imperfection is so much more interesting. Perfect things often trace the same lines of perfection--symmetry, smoothness, clean edges. Imperfection seems to take it's own sweet path wherever it may lead.

I was looking from a second-story building into a beat-up and tired alley, and I told my pastor, "ooh, that's really beautiful. i'd love to get back there and start taking photos. I'm really drawn to disrepair." A little conversation ensued, and being an incredibly agreeable guy who is still committed to truth, my pastor tried to reach me at a half-way point by saying,

"Disrepair in Paris or Rome might also be interesting. That might be worth seeing."

True dat.

But sometimes the trash in your own backyard can rival the greatest trash of the most lovely cities of the world. It's unpredictable that way. It's certainly a wonderful place to take simply fabulous photos.

Or so you like to tell me. And so I ever humbly thank you.