I miss the sound of crickets.  And the breeze coming through the window late at night.  And going outside and smoking a cigarette and looking up at the stars.  

Now I can’t do the math.  Can’t make sense of numbers.  I’m the person who tries to please everyone, or I was that way once.  Now I ignore everything I can. I keep trimming away at everything around me, hoping one day there won’t be anything left.  

It’s a very gradual process.  

“You know you can just turn off your cell phone?” someone tells me.

But I like it better my way, always have.  It always has that dash of Carrollness about it.  A little bit extreme, a little bit crazy. A little idealistic, a little naive.  

That’s probably what people think, anyway.  

I have a dream about Katelyn, who I probably haven’t spoken to in a decade.  She got married a long time ago, and was living in St. Paul.

The last I heard, anyway.

I remember something she said to me once, about me being unrealistic.  About how no one else would go along with it. About how impractical I was, about photography and the projects I wanted to do, the people I was willing to photograph, maybe a lack of orthodoxy or my reluctance to go about things the way they probably should have been done.  

It seems strange to me to try and curtail what you really are, deep down.  The gut instinct or impetus to go out and do something, raw and uncut, that pure genesis.  I know we’re all getting older and trying to be better, but that doesn’t mean some things about us weren’t right from the start.  I guess the hard part is figuring out what to keep alive and what to let die.