A Different Take on Pictures

What Writers and Memories Have In Common with Canon 

(or any other camera, for that matter)

There's a stanza in one of my favourite poems ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), but not at all my favourite stanza, which reads:

I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows.

It always reminds me of a very characteristic old man I saw leaning out the window of a building above a very crowded Parisian street, watching, with ostensible amusement, all the pedestrians hurrying their way across the street in the narrow flow of the crosswalk freshet.

I like to think this tanned, leather-skinned man not only enjoyed all us pedestrians hastily going this or that way, but that this gentleman watched every day the hoards migrate.

I had wanted to take a picture of this old, smiling man, his big eyes wide and amused, his white undershirt wrinkled like his skin. But, between his noticing me glancing and me not desiring to upset the quick pace of foot traffic, I restrained.

When I went back to that crosswalk and peered, camera ready, at the window, he was gone.

It doesn't weigh me down, but I've never forgiven myself for not being "socially unacceptable" in raising my lens, in taking a photo a perfect stranger, in deviating from the status quo of respected privacy, in being different. Andy Warhol, the famous American pop artist, perhaps said it best: "You have to do stuff that average people don't understand, because those are the only good things."

Religiously Routine, Ritualistically Regular

Regularity is hugely important in our lives; it's the basis of day-to-day functionality. [Insert bowel-movement joke here.] We do all sorts of things every day with regularity, but are those things regular occurrences? Or are they little rituals we have? That sounds cultish, so maybe they're routines of ours... These little habits, do we do them religiously? 

© Spencer Higgs, 2012

One of my little habits, one of these little things I did day-to-day, was drink. Yes, alcohol; yes, copiously. However, as of today, I'm a day or two out of what was a month-long temperance movement. A little 'time out' from alcohol after what have proven to be a rather indulgent few months, especially that month of and preceding the holidays. So a month off to cleanse and be in control – to break habit and prove I wasn't alcoholic – sounded good. Right, I'm a drinker, but what kind? I'm certainly not dependant (in fact, now free of abstinence practice, I still don't feel any urge to drink), but did I drink copious amounts of alcohol religiously, routinely, ritualistically, or regularly? In a fit of inability to describe myself, I decided to learn the difference in these very similar words, and then share my findings. 

Lucky you. 

Oikos Ain't

Gullibility + Laziness = Ignorance

Ignorance pisses me off.

So does the fact that so much of our choice in food is not just unhealthy, but by ratio of ingredients barely constitutes food at all. (Take a look at nutritional label of popular foods; many of the ingredients aren't just difficult to pronounce, they're damn near impossible to digest.) But, what really concerns me (and pisses me off) is everyone knows this, though few seem to mind. How many of you jump on a food-craze wagon because you saw an advertisement market it as healthy? Be honest. Have a cup of Greek yogurt in the fridge? Well, maybe you do, but maybe you don't, despite what the label says. 

Indeed, Greek yogurt is the vogue health food right now. What's not in vogue is learning why it's healthy. And dare not ask if it's actually healthier than regular yogurt. 

http://twentytweets.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/greek-yogurt-yay-or-nay/

The good news: by and large, Greek Yogurt is healthier (Phew!). 

The bad news: you're not sure why (Hmmm, he's right...). 

Many of those four-ounce tubs of what you're told is Greek yogurt (Oooh, it's so exotic! I think I'll pay way too much for it...) are really just standard yogurt, with a little sumtin'-sumtin' thrown in. I say sumtin'-sumptin' because I'm not exactly sure what it is. And, chances are, neither do you.

Let's go over what Greek yogurt is:

Around the World in 8.0 Mbps

Petra, Jordan

It used to be a rare, cool thing to find a great website on the Internet. Now, however, anybody with a connection can create a website; with so many persons creating websites, more and more great websites have surfaced. Like this one, for example.

But there are some that beg to be exploited.

One of my favourite is www.earthcam.com, a website that brings you views of public areas from all over the world. Today, I checked the surf in South Florida (it's flat), peeked through the columns of the city of Petra, Jordan (literally, a city in stone), stoked my romantic side (don't take that the wrong way) with a view of Paris blanketed beneath a thin sheet of snow, and virtually patronised one of the most famous pubs in Dublin (The Temple Bar).

The site allows you to access live camera views as well as archives; so you can see how good the waves were while you were visiting relatives in Boringtown, Nowhere; or watch a pedestrian (in)discretely pick his nose in Time Square. Additionally, EarthCam allows you control over some of the cameras, with zoom, volume and cam manoeuvrability functions.


The only real downside to EarthCam? Well, while you get a picture of all these exotic and enticing places around the world, you don't actually get the real picture: you're not there to see it yourself. So, if you're actually paying for your Internet connection, I advise you learn to hack the local Starbucks' feed and stash that money in a savings account. Let those dollars roll up, and get yourself a plane ticket, dude. Budhapest is so much cooler than it looks.

Free Music! Dig.

Copyright Spencer Higgs 2013

Death and Taxes... and Music

Not everyone loves music. I know, right. Weirdoes. But those who do, do. They get it. It gets to them. Music, incidentally, is like people: some being likeable, some deplorable; the distinction intrinsic to whomever is the listener. My girlfriend, Hailey, (who, apropos to nothing, is beautiful and lovely and a wild dancing fool-angel of cool, and best not forget it) once harangued me for referring to pop songs on the radio as "shit music". She argued no music is shit music; it means something to someone. Indeed, she's right, and I haven't used the term since... in her company.  

Further personifying tunes, good songs become good friends. And unless you are a frat boy (and if you are, it's cool, dude-bro, I'm not hatin'), you probably don't like paying for friends. (Okay, I'm hatin' a little bit.) The point is, everyone loves free music. And while musicians are by each passing day facing the day when welfare and food stamps will soon be the near-norm for even the fleeting few popular acts, the Internet Age has opened listeners' doors to vast exposure and vast access. And the cool part is, so much of it is free these days--legally! 

Here's a few free-music websites to help expand your milieux.

Paradocks and Matrices and Middlegroundlandia

When the fine line between adolescence and adulthood widens, blaze forth down the middle. Sirah and beer, Easy Mac and smoked clams.

Now, at twenty-five (25) years (yrs) old (opposite of young), I find myself torn, stuck, lodged – and also dislodged – confined, and nakedly exposed to middle-middle age. Car insurance didn't go down like I thought it would, sparking a tremorous fear that I'll be parsimoniously dissuaded from buying a Corvette during the incipient onset of my future mid-life crisis. 

(I'll probably end up purchasing a 2037 Prius – good God!) 

When I was younger, I despised the effects of ostentatious existence, indeed, of wealth itself. Then: money, money, money, baby! Now, I'm cloud-lofting back to, if not a simpler existence, a simpler mindset. Pure ideology. Pura Vida. 

(Which reminds me, I'm due to go rogue in Costa Rica sometime soon.)

I have two jobs: I'm a dock master at a small marina, where I wear flip-flops to work (not as cool as it sounds... really...); I'm an intern researching computer programming, coding, and designing at an advertising company, where I wear slacks and a custom-fitted collared shirt (cooler than it sounds... kinda). I'm making a matrix, and, in doing so, learning that The Matrix is far more accessible and enjoyable than developing a real one.

Life is a paradox.

With a beer in one hand, a Shiraz (Syrah) in the other, a box of Easy Mac, a shell of smoked Cajun clam, I am a contradiction. I am the middle of the road.

I like it like that.

Happiness Is

Just now, awaiting the arrival of my dear friend Alyson to come pull me from the throes of lonesomeness and uncertainty (that's a WHOLE other metaphorical monster awaiting disclosure! But she's a soon-to-be-psychiatrist, so maybe she'll lend a hand there), I was peeling away the skin of some very ripe mangos. You see, we're going to confine all these mango chunks into a blender, flick the ON switch of the wheeling, jagged, sordid machine and mini-machety the saccharine fruit into juice. We'll add rum, of course. We'll sit by the pool and muse and laugh and chat and reminisce.

As I was peeling away the skin of one hunk of mango, a flashback backslapped me with a memory of climbing the (Haitian) mango tree behind St. Andrew's School. And then of being a fearless, bridle-less, invincible island boy: salt on my sunburned skin, sand imbedded in my sun-bleached hair. Sucking the seed of the mango I thought of two things: a few days ago, preparing a fruit bowel, my boss proclaimed "Why do mango's have such large seeds!" It was not a question; it was consternation. "So ya can suck da seed!" I explained, a distant Bahamian dialect inconspicuously following my words off the tip of my tongue. She didn't get it. She doesn't get much.

It secondly reminded me of my father, his voice, his view of life as an invariably beautiful thing. (In the endless wake of his passing, I find this distraughtingly ironic.) He would have said--and every soul out there who knew him, would know for sure, and could hear his voice--smiling, hunched over the sink with an over-flow of mango juice spilling down his chin: "Happiness is!"

Ironic, too, is that my mother--just yesterday--discovered a previously non-existant allergy to mangos. What luck. How sucky to not get to suck a mango seed!

None of this has much relevance to anything in the world, except that isn't it nice that biting into fruit can unearth the pleasantry that is fond memories.