It’s all fake.  

I don’t want anything to do with that.  

Need another drink, some rum and some ginger beer.  

Thinking about seeing my family in another week or so.  Two cigarettes left in the pack. Tomorrow I’ll buy more.  

“You were doing good with quitting,” a friend tries to tell me. 

But quitting wasn’t doing good with me.  

Gotta punish the thing you are, still.  

Late at night, just before the sleep comes.  I look out the window at apartments like mine where other people are living their lives.  

 

I should edit her photos.  I should give her some to post to Instagram.  But I don’t want anyone to know I took them. I hate myself for having taken them.  It seems like there’s nothing there. Just someone smiling back.  

Fake.  

It’s all a joke.  Photograph me this way, doing this thing, saying nothing.  

Need to give them money, pay a model.  No one wants to get out there and create art.  People just want basic shit for their instagram or social media. 

People just want a pretty lie.  But an ulgy truth is better, if it has to be ugly.  Just let it be true.  

Let it be real.  

People still telling me to make money at it.  I could make money at anything.  

When I pick up a camera, I want to create something good with it.  Not a pretty picture, not a photograph someone pays a lot of money for.  

Something I can’t live without.  Something that changes a person’s life, just looking at it.  

A mandala.  A revelation.  A sunburst, or life, or death.  

But that’s self-important bullshit.  I am not that kind of person. Just want to clean away the clutter.  Live and love simply. Every day I step out, a camera over one arm and my mind purged of pre-conceptions.  

“Come do weddings,” my little brother says.  And there was a time when I wanted the two of us to work together – him posing people and me slipping like an eel through crowds to find that zen shot.  

But now, I think, I am shirking the commercial, and the money, and the greed that drives for more.  I’m obsessed, still, with photography. But on my own crooked terms, in my own bizarre way. What good is clarity without the madness?  Deep down I know I’m not a straightlaced professional type. I’m a shoot-from-the-hip while cursing-a-blue-streak kind of guy.  

Deeply, sincerely unhinged and harmless, but hell-bent on divining something moving from the mundane.  

Anyway, it doesn’t matter.

No one will be knocking at my door.  Truth be told, I’m not all that good.  Even I know it.  

And I’m just another jackass with a camera.