Obviously the person in this photo {removed} is telling someone on the other side of the lens to fuck off. Well, I ask you; is she telling YOU to fuck off, or simply the camera operator? How would you feel if indeed it was you who is supposed to fuck off? You'd probably feel nothing as you don't know this person, nor do you know what might have sparked her ire. Also, you instinctually know from markers in her facial expression that this particular 'fuck off' is performed with a certain since of what we now call 'irony,' but what we used to call 'love.' Also, the little head she has growing out of her hair is smiling which is also a good sign that what she means by that finger there is, yes indeed, 'fuck off,' but more in the sense of, "I hope you fart loudly next time you're in church" and not, "I hope you are drafted and have to die in Iraq."

I can plainly tell you that she was telling the photographer to fuck off. It was me, and I just didn't know when to quit. I still don't much of the time.

This is the view from my back door sometime this last summer. That is my cat, Monkey. I've since had to put Monkey on a diet as she is having trouble "reaching."









This is a flower on the campus of the University of Mississippi. I should say, it was a flower on campus, but the ravages of time and the inescapability of the seasons have doubtless reduced this flower into dust and other like particles. The bee is probably dead too.






This is August, my son by circumstance, fate, proxy or whatever. Do you see the look on his face? This is Christmas. He has already opened various gifts including a bunch of plastic things he asked for with blinky lights and so on and the real, wooden practice samurai sword that I bought for him to replace the shitty little wooden sword he has all but destroyed. The look on his face in this picture is as he is opening a tube full of gumballs. Not the samurai sword. The motherfucking gumballs.

Here I am

I'm starting to stress. How in the world does a 35 year old man find himself with the jitters at the fact that he's about to enter "the world" after college? I need a job and I want it to be in Austin from where I hailed more than a decade ago, and I'm concerned at the prospects like any normal 23 year old should when he leaves University. But what really kinda scares me is that all along in my life as I was cooking my ass off to pay the bills, I knew plenty of folk with no degree in kick ass jobs, and plenty of other folk with great degrees in shit fuck jobs and now that I've almost completed a degree in Philosophy I feel that I am more qualified that some to ask the question, "What the fuck is a job, anyhow?"

It's a funny little word. How can a word that works well prefixed with 'hand-,' 'boob-,' and 'blow-,' be such an angry thing when preceded by another little word, "No." Or put the word "shitty" in front of the word "job" and what have you got? You start thinking that Chris Walken's character in "The Deer Hunter" had a pretty good job there toward the end of the movie. Better than total uncertainty.