Belonging

Stayed up late on Friday night on account of our pal George Cutright had a photo show. A lovely occasion! It was a warm night, and everyone rode bikes. There was much wine and beer drunk, and thus plenty of drunk talk. Also? A basketball kept bouncing perilously inside through the open roll-up door, finding unsuspecting heads to hit and beer cups to tip over.

Now, George's show: a collection of half-frame pictures of "people and the skateboards they belong too." What he did was he took out his camera (read: not phone) and pressed down on the shutter button once while pointing at a person, and then again while pointing at their skateboard. He then went into the dark room (remember those?!) and created each print using an ages-old method called film developing.

Skateboarding might not be what regular 30 (and 40!!) somethings choose to do on a daily basis. But here in our circle, it is. It's how we maintain fun in our lives and give meaning to our days. It's how we keep the angst at bay. It's how we find our place and our people. It's how we keep our bodies healthy and remember that sometimes, strangely, falling down feels good.

Getting hurt can suck it of course.

Pic by Brooke Geery.

Tolstoy Is My Boy

I'm sure you're dying to know—but I did finally finish War And Peace. And I take back my earlier remarks. It ripped! Tolstoy's a master historian, and I learned all about Napoleon's Russian campaign. But that's not the thing that got me. What roped me in was the sheer narrative force—a slow, sweeping current that you're helpless in the face of. It is a novel in the old-school sense, with these incredibly complex, human characters that struggle against themselves and each other and the world. Natasha! Prince Andrew! Pierre! I'll probably still think about them all from time to time for a while.

I was at Powell's this morning and saw the very fitting sign above. Tolstoy IS my boy now.

In other news, we rode downtown last night in the April rain to see a photo show by father and son Kanights. Yep Bryce and his dad self-published a photo book on Blurb.com and this was the opening party or whathaveyou. How cool, that snapping images runs in a bloodline.

As you can see, there were a bunch of babes there, but the music was too damn loud to talk and so we were driven back out onto the dark, damp streets and across the bridge to our northeast haven.