Day 111 - Thousand words worth less than (no) picture

See that last photo? Wasn't it fun? Well, I was using my lomo camera because the digital was being unreliable.

Yesterday I dropped and broke my lomo, so that's done for too.

But you know what I've found out? Saying hello to someone different, every day, is the lesson. Asking may I make art from your face is the shaolin daily exercise part of this project.

Everybody knows if you take a hundred pictures, if you're really lucky, you might get two good ones, and a canny photographer scrubs the bunk ones. You poor people here been only been getting my scrubs.

Seeing people as themselves, as integral as it is to this goal I've set for myself, has made little changes in how I think and live....like tiny grains of sand day by day diverting that sludgy tired old river up north there back to the sea where it belongs.

We all belong to the same sea.

When I'm asking someone if I can take their photo, a peculiar thing keeps on happening to me, over and over again. I feel less intimidated, or annoyed, by people, and start to feel like we're all speeding souls on this cosmic freeway. We're all part of a big organism that may be heading somewhere worthy or not, but our survival, or at least the pleasantness of the ride, is dependent on each other.

In the past 110 days, I've gone from self-hate and compulsively trying to compete with the most beautiful and talented self-portraitists on Narcissusland, to feeling like the person who is in charge of rate assignments after Armageddon hits. I see the value in everyone. Every face. It just doesn't come across in this pictures. Yet.

Letting go of my need to look good in pictures, be all ego-stroking things to all anonymous buzznetters, to make money or get strokes for my blogging, all burned away in the mad new obsession to look at the folks speeding by and say hello.

Now, surprisingly and paradoxically, I want to dance. I'm dancing better than ever.

"Dance everyday, if only on the inside", the great Arabia once said. Word.

The same thing goes for my Anyone But Me project. I look at your face, frame you in
an imaginary portrait, every single day, if only behind and between my eyes.

Opa Cupa