Get Up and Run

..though the hits will come

Friday Night Lights shot on 35mm Fujifilm 1600 Press

I was looking for something this morning way down deep in the mammoth of images stored on various hard-drives, c.d.s, dvds., negatives., a rabbit hole of old fashioned long days standing at the freezing cold darkroom lab baths to the technology that endlessly changes. I found this football scan of when I tried to do slo motion at night purposely created a perfectly messy football image to describe how it must feel to soar into a sea of buff dudes ready to send you flying. This actually was my intention while running up and down the sidelines for my kid’s football games.

I was looking for all my peacock images, which I still haven’t found.

Am I adapting I thought? because my brain is really hating my newer and newer (every time I use Adobe now) updated apps, television apps, tiny remotes that need never ending battery replacements, “Ring” for safety, which all disappeared in a thunderstorm yesterday… and deals. I hate deals. An app for this, an app for that, boundless, incessant games. Games that leave me feeling like a crook ready to hold up the cashier ready to run out the door with my “deals.” “Do you have our app? if you do, just go here, then clip the deals, then go here, then there’s a scan bar you can show me and it should align with your phone number, so you can get the gas points.” My answer: “What if I was 87, took all morning to get ready, took the community dollar ride here, was half blind and hard of hearing?” Then what?” “Or how about my husband? He literally cannot go to the store without he feels he needs to bring home 10 soda packs? He doesn’t do deals well. In fact he looks very angry when he comes home.”

Hot summers in construction ditches leave occasional desires for a coke or a beer. One pack should suffice.

Supermarket deals so deep I envision myself sitting in a casino, while everyone else is playing the slots. I am in a backroom, blinded by the smoke of onlookers holding their phones, making purchases in five seconds, to my look of disdain, as I snarl through my next move on the chess board.

I thought I was good at chess. I’m not. I want to be. I’m slithering, sinking off of my oversized leather chair and with a stomp of my foot thud on my skinny old butt and a head bump, as I rise, I have a choice to get up, stay.. or run.

My husband told me last night over a very expensive fast food date in our old van cheap tacos, accompanied by water, that he saw a really sweet young woman, a hard working young woman, who took to Instagram, which I find totally awkward and desperate to say she was done. She is paying $1800/month rent, has a career a job that is no longer affording her the ability to eat. She has cut-down on everything possible to make it and she can’t. She has no family. He didn’t know where she lived. He wanted to say RUN. Find a state where you can do better. They exist. He wanted to tell her, come live in our spare room and save some money. But in his completely obnoxious and very delayed new habit of Instagraming late at night he told me what the comments said.

I could feel the tears in my eyes rising up and I’m healing from another crazy hemorrhage in my right eye, saying “please don’t tell me the comments.”

He went onto say, “they were sooo idealistic, unrealistic and ridiculous.”

Armchair demons.

This morning I read that young people have not recovered well from the isolation of the pandemic and nor should anyone expect them to. It was brutal and one hundred percent unnecessary. There is a rise in depression and suicide among the young and a hopelessness among the young who are trying to succeed. When you get to a point that you have given it everything you got, carrying the ball to the other side of the field through a quagmire of hits, punches, setbacks and very little support, what is left?

I say get up and run. Sell everything and run. Do what your ancestors did. Find a job in a place that affords you rent and support. I could care less if it’s “left or right, purple or black, warm or cold (weather that is), bugs or butterflies, GO. Make a plan and go. Get off the field, the apps, the crap that weights you down in the steamy allure of gaslighting.

You, dearest Instagram girl times thousands upon thousands, I am praying you take a risk as big as your ancestors who stormed the Civil War battlefields and the beaches of Normandy, in the name of freedom… and as small as seventeen-year-old Annie Moore, from County Cork, Ireland, who on January 1st, 1892 was the first immigrant to be processed on Ellis Island. Her family went through the Great Famine.

Dear sweet young girl, I do have tears for you, because you were raised to take to social media, but you have somehow managed to scrape up $1800 dollars a month for rent and that is a cruel, deeply inflated amount lot of money better spent somewhere else. There are places in this country, unlike the big cities, who rob you dry push you out, keeping gas prices per gallon higher than a burger and starve you to death. Places like Arkansas, South Dakota, begging for working professionals of all types. I know you’ve got this because you already proved you could pick up the ball and run. These inflated, deeply troubling times are hard not abnormal. We must keep running toward reality and get out of the way of what is harming us. I wish I could hug you. You will make new friends. I promise. ox

As for me, I’m heading to Trader Joes where I don’t have to play chess in a back room.

---

You'll walk unscathed through musket fire,
No ploughman's blade will cut thee down,
No cutlass pull will mark thy face
And you will be my ain true love,
And you will be my ain true love
And as you walk through death's dark veil,
The cannon's thunder can't prevail,
And those who hunt thee down will fail,
And you will be my ain true love,
And you will be my ain true love.
Asleep inside the cannon's mouth,
The captain cries, "here comes the rout, "
They'll seek to find me north and south,
I've gone to find my ain true love.
The field is cut and bleeds too red.
The cannon balls fly round my head,
The infirm'ry man may count me dead,
When i've gone to find my ain true love,
I've gone to find my ain true love.

- My Ain True Love, Alison Kraus

What has been will be again,
    what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun.

- Ecclesiastes 1:9