NOT MY REMEDY

By MICHAEL PERKINS

OKAY, LET’S JUST STIPULATE THAT MOST OF US HAVE A larrrrrrrge photo folder filled with what I call SLAGIATT images. Now, longtime friends of this gazette will recognize that acronym as one of my favorites, this one translating to Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time. You know what’s in the folder: bold experiments, failed executions, incomplete concepts, impossible tasks…..an “orphans” file for the stuff that didn’t work out, the ones that got away. Maybe you yourself don’t actually have such a folder per se, because the shots that qualified for it went to Delete Purgatory years ago. Whatevs. The fact is that the SLAGIATTs always, always outnumber the Keepers. They worry us, haunt us, like running your tongue over where a lousy tooth was extracted, a tooth that, with a little more flossing, you might have saved.

This right here is a SLAGIATT picture.

In early 2024, I was stricken with a particularly bad patch of sciatica. We’re not talking a mild ache here, but a week-long I may-need-help-getting-to-the-john stretch of agony and sleep deprivation. As it happened, the back end of the bout coincided with my birthday, which I usually mark with a formalized self-portrait, an annual state-of-the-union on my face, and what it does or does not project to the camera. I decided not to skip the ritual, despite how I felt, and thus ground out a few of the most painful pictures I have ever produced. I’m not talking about the physical discomfort involved in sitting for the session, but rather of the dismay I experienced looking at the result. I’m sure I thought, at the time (there’s that phrase again), that showing myself in distress was…..what? Honest? Authentic? Brave?? Maybe I thought, hey, I subject everything else to my camera’s unblinking, indifferent eye, so why not my wracked frame? Well, it might have been good mental therapy(again) at the time, but, looking at the pictures a year and a half later, it’s like looking at home movies of a very bad facelift.

This whole issue wouldn’t be top-of-mind with me if I hadn’t just spent another recent multi-week stretch ouching myself around the house, this time with a pinched nerve. Not quite the same level of grief as the sciatica, but enough that, in the mirror, I see, not a brave, determined soul, but merely a tired, sick whiny-baby who wants to get well, like, yesterday. No selfie is going to make me feel “determined”, or stoic, or courageous, at least not right now. And as for my camera, the only thing that’s keeping me positive at present is daydreaming of the day when I can get back out there and point it at something else. Anything else. That may not be the artistic way of seeing the situation, but there it is. In any event, the whole review has been good for me. Some ideas are so bad that they merit a re-think, and maybe a few reflective fingers of scotch.