I saw pics of Lotte van Reil and Alexis Lamoureux's renovation of the one "one buck' cave that they transformed into Chez Hélène-Amboise Troglodyte.......I've thought about similar projects since my teens, but never went as extreme as they........I still wish I had been involved in the Coober Pety underground developments, but Australia seemed so far away and it was a challenge to go such a distance into a World of unexpectations....I settled for remodelling a house in Midtown and a Condo at The Desoto, on 7th St.....Now, I'm set in my labyrinthine dwelling, but am fortunate enough to still have the option of vacationing at the cabin, Les Recontres Naturelle, in N. Ga.......My advice to the young? 20-30 is the Time, my friends.....the time to experiment with your Life.......Go for it! "Non, je ne regrette rien" is a better memory than "J'ai perdu ma vie"......Just don't linger around the deep well of unrealistic expectations......

 another de-saturated day, of simplification of process thinking......I watched an episode....well, sort of, since it was so like a hundred other similarly-formatted reality 'talent' contests.....of Master Of Photography.......Even though the Program, itself, was a line up of appealingly on-trend, if governed by the ever-increasing 'rules' of 'how it's done'..images.....'correctly' within the 'dictates' of 'photographic' aesthetics......oh, pleeze!!......I didn't take my 'hat' off, of course......I thought of the praises and criticisms of Art, in its multifarious forms, throughout 'critical assessment' history.....laughed, not without a mental syringe of borderline contemptuousness, or compliance with any subliminal direction or suggestive musical soundtrack.....I thought Isabella Rossellini would be "there" for all that artsy-fartsy 'stuff'....That's really why I went there, after all.....

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 “Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self contradictory rules. Just because we do not exist apart from the community, the community is able to convince us that we do--that each one of us is an independent source of action with a mind of its own. The more successfully the community implants this feeling, the more trouble it has in getting the individual to cooperate, with the result that children raised in such an environment are almost permanently confused.”

~Alan Watts in “The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are"

Rufus Wroden Gattis

this may have been the last photo of my maternal grandfather, Rufus Wroden....R.W........from a 16mm Minox spy camera negative.....soon after, he was taken to a hospital, diagnosed with prostate cancer.....in his nineties....When he was told that he was too old to go through 'therapy', he left the hospital....still in his hospital 'gown', and began to walk home.....to climb a ladder and paint some window trim that had been 'put off' for decades.....On his 'way' home from the hospital, he entered a trafficy road to rescue a young child that had run into the road to retrieve a rolling rubber ball.....and was bumped by a halting vehicle....breaking his hip....so.....back to the hospital...this time in an ambulance....where he contracted septicemia and died........'R.W." had been my single most influential person, philosophically.....and would endure my persistent questions, answering them with acerbic and hilarious quips and labyrinthine, circuitously didactic tales from his long Lifetime of experience in his Mind......When asked "Why do birds fly?", he replied.....'Well, they're smarter than people, aren't they?" or "Why do plants have flowers?"........."Well, the same reason people have babies...

KATRINA MOTISKA......C. 1970......SHORTLY BEFORE HER DESCENT AND DESTRUCTION.........

 

ENTRANCE/EXIT TO A 'GAY BAR'........C. 1961