February

This is an attempt to break writer’s block. I haven’t written anything since November. Usually, I’ll at least have an idea in my head, but the gourd’s empty. There is nothing there. The other night walking down the street I got the seed of a thing, but it left me and I need to figure out how to go find it.

Whatever is happening with my writing is not isolated, I’ve had some issues reading as well. I made it halfway through putting together a little model Y-Wing the other day before getting frustrated and having to put it down; I couldn’t keep my hands quite steady enough to put one little piece of plastic into another, and so it has sat on my living room table now for weeks taunting me. I started it because I found that when I get down, especially when I’m deeply overthinking, doing little Lego sets helps distract me. Lego is expensive, though, so R-2 and C-3PO and my little bundle of miniature bonsai trees needed something cheaper for coping. Turns out, the expense might be worth it.

I hadn’t been to take photos in some months until recently. I was lying on the couch late one night wishing I were not here in DC but also that I was not anywhere that I’d been or knew or had known anyone before, looking at pictures of Monument Valley. I have wanted to go out there and roam around with my camera for a while, but I also don’t think 35mm is necessarily great for those kinds of shots. I’m also not sure I could capture anything beyond photographic tropes. These are the kinds of circumstances that lead me into retail therapy. So, a few weeks and a few visits to eBay after that late night, I left my office carrying a beat-up Yashica D 120 camera, with a little light meter latched on with a mount I 3D printed.

120 film is quite a bit bigger than 35mm. My Yashica takes 6x6cm frames, so something shy of 4 times as large as 35mm. These are supposed to be better for landscapes, capture more detail, etc., etc. My camera is twin-reflex, so it has a viewing lens and a taking lens. It’s probably at least twenty years older than my other cameras and looks it. It makes big, chunky mechanical clacking sounds when the top door pops open to reveal the finder (you look down through the camera, rather than holding it in front of your face). There is even a magnifying glass you can pop out to get good focus. It is all manual and lacks even a rudimentary light meter, hence my 3D printing work.

I took a roll of film and sent it off to The Darkroom to see if it worked at all. I knew I’d be able to develop 120 at home, though after that how to do anything with them? My scanner only takes 35mm, and my enlarger for prints won’t take 120 either. So, I joined a community darkroom to use their scanner and enlargers for 120. When my first 12 shots (all you get with a roll with this camera) came back from The Darkroom I was pleasantly surprised. I shot these on Ilford FP4+ 125 at 125. I’d gotten into the habit of shooting Kentmere 100 pushed to 400, which is cheaper than buying the Ilford, but I really like the look of FP4 and ended up buying another 100ft reel of that for 35mm.

I took two more rolls of 120 in the Yashica, in varying light situations. This is when I had that germ of the idea I mentioned earlier, something about the way in which DC feels like it has changed over the past year. I ran into a patrol of National Guard around 9pm one night on a residential street and that surprised me. Anyway, that set me to photographing the NG a few times (and talking to some of them), though unfortunately when I developed those two rolls of film at home, all of the low-light shots were complete losses. As best I can figure, this old camera wants its dials to be aligned exactly, otherwise its shutter speed is unreliable and unpredictable.

As an added bonus, hanging the first wet reel of 120 by the hooked clips I have, I did not realize how slippery and how much heavier 120 film is. As soon as I stepped out of my bathroom (where I hang negatives to dry), I heard them slip out of the hook and hit the floor, so when I go tomorrow to scan them they will probably look like they’ve been through a duststorm. So, of the first three rolls of 120 I’ve shot, only the one is not a failure. That is okay — you have to be willing to burn things (and yourself) to learn.

The move to 120 is probably the only creative thing I’ve managed in the past four months. I’ve been experimenting a little bit with home server things; I made a tool to track my physical media collection (and unfortunately calculated that I own a little over $2k worth of disks, lord), I made tblibrary.com one afternoon when someone at work accused me of not reading fun books (and according to my data they are mostly wrong!). Other than that, my creativity extends only as far as 3D printing some brackets so I can hang my wine glasses from the top of my cabinets and save some room.

—

We had the big snow in DC a few weeks back, remnants of which are still around in the form of hulking grey piles of “snow.” I was unprepared for how woefully incompetent the city would be at handling what I would have considered Minor Weather in Chicago. I had a therapy appointment one Tuesday (one new thing since November) and waiting for the bus found myself annoyed when it simply… didn’t come. The transit app suggested it would be running, as did google maps. Yet, the entire route had been cancelled. So, I trudged a mile through the snow and had the sort of cautious conversations one has in therapy and then trounced back.

Though, that does make it sound less annoying than it was. Attempting to cross 16th at Columbia, I found that they had simply not bothered to even pretend to clear sidewalk entrances and exits for street crossings. Several people were scaling mountains to make it across, and some were kitted out as if they were on Everest itself. I saw people with those double-handed walking stick things that I associate only with the very old and the very high in altitude. Occasionally I would get to a patch of sidewalk that had not been cleared, and I would turn my head the better with which to level my civic scorn. Infallibly, it was an abandoned or condemned building. I did not eat shit ONCE though, which I think is a real accomplishment.

—

For the past few days I’ve been at home sick. In the murky mix of wakefulness and dreams I sneezed and couched and coughed and took lots of tylenol and benadryl and dayquil and whatever other pill-shaped thing I could find in my cabinets to try and abbreviate the headaches that arrived with all the phlegm. The first day I sneezed approximately twenty-two thousand, seven-hundred and three times.

—

I had a dream in that mix. I was on the run, and had to get onto a ship, it was a barge. I ran into this warehouse and a rotund Russel Crowe sat at a desk (imagine him with his hair from American Gangster but then age him up twenty years). I said Let’s Go and we were then on a barge in the middle of a harbor. But then quite suddenly (perhaps I sneezed and time jumped) we were in the middle of the sea and the ship (now a boat) had stalled. It could only be started by sticking a pistol into a little port on the side and firing. Dream logic dictated that the bullet would travel down this route and ignite something and do something else and start the engine. I knew this as though I had an Engineering degree. The problem was the only pistol we had was Fresh Out, all the shots had been fired and we had but one spent casing left. And it had to be this gun, we couldn’t use anything else. The gun was a little silver thing, and the round looked nothing like a real bullet. But in the dream I knew it was a .380 and I had a sidetrack dream trying to find this type of round and finding them very expensive (I have not bought bullets for ten years so who knows). The best Russel and I could do was to disassemble a larger rifle round (???) and reload the .380 round — apparently we had the kit to do this. Anyway, we got the boat started.

—

The other day I was at work three hours late in meetings, which I would characterize as Frustrating. I was so exhausted that the next day I slept straight through my alarm and didn’t wake up until I was nearly two hours late for work. This has never happened before. I was still at work before most folks got into the office, thankfully.

—

I found myself today reading documentation on the Palantir website. This was one of the more surreal and strange occurrences of the past week, trumping even my world record accomplishment for most sneezes in a one-minute period. For anyone reading who may not know, Palantir is an uncomplicatedly evil organization. I was reading about ontology, which is the philosophical study of being and existence. I doubt Palantir’s and my ontological philosophy have much overlap. But one of ours has a bit more purchase in reality at the moment than the other.

Palantir takes its name from the palantiri in the Lord of the Rings. If you have not read the books, the palantiri are crystal balls, but they are unreliable. They can be manipulated and are to be treated with suspicion at best. A major theme of their role in the story is that trusting the future to magic is not wise (by my reading). And of course there is the old adage that any technology of sufficient sophistication is indistinguishable form witchcraft.

A kind reading of Palantir is that they have misunderstood Tolkien’s writing. Though, this is not so. They just think Saruman was Very Cool and would like to see the future only so that they can molest it to their desired shape in its arrival.

—

Once in therapy, I was asked to hold a piece of cloth in my hand while my therapist held the other end. He asked me to think about how it felt in my body to feel the cloth under tension. I was surprised at how emotional this made me.

—

The January book club was packed, more than forty people. I knew that it would be busy, I think for the last two weeks of the month I’d gotten multiple sign-up emails each day. Facilitating continues to be nerve wracking, though perhaps not for the reasons it would be for others. Walking from my apartment to the store I am a ball of nerves, just extremely anxious. I usually get there early and try to help setup or at least pace a little bit and pretend to be gathered. Once I see everyone in the room, and we get underway, it all sort of melts away and feels very natural, though.

—

Another dream.

Our group stood about five miles from the side of a mountain, into which was built a lodge. From a distance I knew it was related to the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. The group was five or six, and none of them I recognized except Harry Truman, the Sheriff of Twin Peaks. I took binoculars from him and through saw steam and smoke rising from the chimneys and windows of what I knew should be an abandoned ruin.

Once in the greatroom of the hotel, someone picked up this little talisman necklace. It looked like a flesh bulb; an ear grown over itself with a little hole in one side, and it was on a black string necklace. Harry held it up and looked through it, and began screaming and tossed it away. I picked it up and looked into it, at first from a distant angle, and what I saw was wrinkled skin inside. I looked back at Harry who waved his gun around looking around at every hallway and door. I held the ear to my eye and looked more closely through, and this time saw a crone’s face, leathery and snarling. She was laughing and laughing and staring back at me. She knew exactly who I was.

Someone fired a gun and I looked up to find the sheriff spinning around firing crazily. All of the shots he fired bounced off whatever they hit and found their way back to him.

Then I woke up.

—

I went into my usual liquor store before the Big Snow to get my once monthly two for twenty bottles of wine. I decided to get a bottle of rum as well to put in my coffee the next day (Saturday). The teller said, “this’ll keep you warm for the snow.” It was Planetary Stiggins’ Fancy pineapple rum, and it tasted very good in some hot tea, as well. I suspect I’ll have the bottle for years, though, so rare is my want to drink hard liquor.

—

Disjointed wreck of dreams, anecdotes, and tangents. I feel like I’m back on blogspot.com.

—

The other day at the start of a meeting, people were catching me up on one the previous day I’d missed. It was evidently all love and joy and roses. One person sarcastically said, “thank god Thomas wasn’t there.” A different person, not sarcastically by my ear, said, “just what I was thinking.” If you want my advice, this is a good way to hurt someone’s feelings.

—

I’ve been experimenting with OpenClaw recently and contemplated buying a separate machine for it out of privacy concerns, then contemplated the amount of computing power I own. Desktop with Ryzen 9 and 3080, server with a Ryzen 5 and 3070, several raspberry pis, numerous other little boards around the house collecting weird data. And yet, at this moment I’m sitting in a community darkroom and Epson Scan 2 isn’t working right because why put out quality Linux drivers?

I didn’t order another computer.

—

I mentioned OpenClaw. I have it walled off so tightly to experiment with it. I’ve done similar with Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. Astounding to me that people are unleashing these tools on their full directories, credit card numbers and internet access in hand.

In setting up OpenClaw, either I or the chatbot’s presentation on Discord first asked, “what should I call you?” I asked what it would like to be called. It chose “Kestrel” which I found interesting.

It’s only task presently is to generate a morning e-mail to me (with it only able to mail to my address, and with its own special e-mail account) with weather, homelessness news, and a haiku.

The haiku is often questionable.

—

What, did you think this post would end with a haiku? I’m not that cliché.

—

Thomas

The photos here and the rest in the Flickr album were shot on a Yashica D with Ilford FP4+ at 125 and developed in Ilfosol 3.