914

i left my car at the “public, you-don’t-have-to-pay-for-a-parking space” near the baseball stadium on the west side of the tracks, and wandered for an hour or so before showing up at westlake mall, which is where the “walk” was going to take place. it turned out that the woman who was monitoring the cameras had a rehearsal this evening, so instead of being a 5 hour walk, it was only 3 hours… they positively hurried compared to the pace they would have taken if it had been 5 hours. i took a whole bunch of pictures – which are linked behind this picture, which is one of my favourites:

walk

this picture was taken as i was leaving. i think i broke ezra’s concentration, but they had been walking for around 2 hours at that point, so i think it was justified.

ron hammond
ron hammond

also, i saw my father, who was taking pictures. i took several pictures of him without him noticing who i was… then i came up behind him and said his name, he turned, and recognised me immediately. i’m not really too surprised, considering that i haven’t even spoken with him in over 2 years, but at the same time, i took 5 pictures of him, and i was fairly obvious about it, but he didn’t realise it was me until the last one, where i actually said his name before clicking the shutter.

i also found a whole bunch of interesting stickers, grafitti, another glove, a wig… ?

blurdge blurdge blurdge
blurdge blurdge blurdge
blurdge
blurdge!

i also made an empirical discovery while driving home that was significant enough to me that i had to take a picture of it, despite the fact that i was driving on the freeway at the time. while i was driving, i drove into a squall, and right at the north edge of it, there was a rainbow that was so bright that i could actually see “the end” of the rainbow, except that it was a circle. unfortunately i couldn’t get a picture of the entire circle, because it was at street level, at the edge of my car… which was hurtling south on I-5 at the speed of traffic at the time, so give me a break. but my discovery that “the end” of the rainbow doesn’t exist solves a mystery that i have wondered about my whole life.

10 thoughts on “914”

  1. i’m particularly interested in “the bald man” stickers, because ezra is the artist that came up with “the bald man”. a couple of years ago, he made it his project to put up 100,000 bald man stickers. i don’t know if he ever came close to reaching that goal, but “the bald man” has become ubiquitous around here since then… 8)

  2. What an interesting post. It’s amazing how something as simple as a long walk can astonish passersby. The pictures are just great too. I’ve seen some pretty neat stickers in Tokyo–maybe I should take some photos of them before I leave.

  3. yes, i have changed a lot since 2003: my injury is just the beginnings of the changes i have made…

    on the other hand, i originally broke off contact with my family-of-origin almost 35 years ago because they resolutely, stubbornly refused to change… when i had not been in contact with them for close to 25 years, i thought i had changed enough that i was ready to be in contact with them again, and i found out that they still hadn’t got over the stuff that they were angry with me about, all of which happened when i was a pre-teenager. i put up with it, for my grandmother’s sake, because she was living with them at the time, but when my grandmother died, things went downhill pretty quickly between us, which culminated in the 15 may, 2003 email, where my father was mean and rude, and broke off contact with me.

    since then i have almost died – they gave my son a ride to the hospital to visit me before i had my surgery, but didn’t come in themselves, and didn’t call or make any kind of contact afterward to see how i was doing – and since then i have seen my parents no more than 3 times… and one of those was last year at the solstice parade, where my father was taking pictures and i was up on the bandstand, and he pointed his camera directly at me, but didn’t even say hi…

    i think he was smiling because he was in a place where he didn’t know anybody, and anybody that knew his name was probably a friend…

  4. i don’t know your family, so you may be right. but maybe age and time are changing and deepening him. it happens. time tends to soften hearts, i think. maybe he’s just getting older and realizing grudges etc aren’t worth it, he’d rather have a friendship with his son, time is short. otherwise, he’s a stubborn bastard who will continue to be mean later, but just smiled like that because for one brief moment he couldn’t help but expose his pleasure at the sight of your face. 🙂 i don’t know. i’ve changed and grown a lot since 2003, haven’t you?

  5. the contrast of the tone of my father’s most recent email to me – dated 15 may, 2003, before my injury – and the expression on my father’s face – when i basically snuck up behind him – is a little more than i can figure out, especially since my interactions with him since 15 may, 2003, have been separated by periods of time greater than a year, and have been no more than 5 minutes in length. i really don’t understand how someone who is that happy to see me could have been so caustic and negative the last time i had any kind of “real” communication with him. it’s that kind of thing that makes me think i am better off staying out of contact with my family-of-origin more than not… 8/

  6. also i think your pot of gold is symbolic, and it’s the experience of your father and son on the same day, at the same place, and the way your dad smiled at you when he saw you, and the fact that your child has grown into an amazing person.

  7. Rupert had an experience once about 25 years ago, where he and three friends were on Clayton Street in the Haight and they saw the literal “end” of the rainbow, it landed right on the street, in the middle of the street. And they were so overjoyed and amazed that they just started shouting for joy and dancing in its colored light in that spot in the middle of the street. I love that story, every time he tells it.

  8. i’m really disappointed to discover that there is no “end of the rainbow” with it’s legendary pot of gold… 8/

  9. I’ve got a few pictures I think you might like, I hope to get them scanned soon… I was staying in Charlottetown, PEI for a month for some job training, and one night while I was walking to a restaurant, I saw some chalk-writing on the corner of a building… I went to the nearest camera store, bought some film and rented one of the store’s cameras so I could capture this at a few different angles… and just to use up the film I also snapped a few “concept” shots.

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