Its been a long while since I've put myself in front of the camera. Sometimes being the observer, fly on the wall you feel like you aren't a participant in life only an observer. I think I need to photograph myself more often. Is it vanity, is it arrogance, or conceitedness, no. Its just a need for self awareness. You only live once. You only look the way you do once. Ten years from now I might be bald, fat, wrinkled, not as cool as i look in the picture so why not celebrate yourself while you can. It don't last for ever and as Pee Wee Herman use to say, "Why don't you take a pictures it'll last longer."There are very few pictures that I actually enjoy of myself and this is probably one of the best ones of me. Perhaps I'm hyper critical of myself but that goes with the territory of being me. A critical eye is needed. People pay big bucks for the critical eye. I watch a lot of Gordon Ramsey shows, hells kitchen, kitchen nightmares and you can see he has such a critical eye that he's made millions off of it. People need others to tell them what's good. When all of America's tastes and pallets have been groomed on MacDonald and Burger King we really don't know what the hell is good.
I'm a fast food junkie. I spent two hundred dollars last month on eating out. Two hundred bucks, piss on me. I could have bought a nice lens for that amount or put a down on the Pentax k10d which I'm looking to buy. So I'm on fast food restriction. Now that I'm eating good food, real food, food i have cook myself and don't even crave fast food anymore. Funny i think fast food in America is nothing more than an addiction. Everything about it simply triggers all frontal lobe pleasures sensors. The burger, high fat, topped with cheese and salt. All of which tell your brain damn that food is good. The fries are fried in oil topped with more salt and have an addictive taste to them. Try to just eat one i bet you can't. Then the soda. A big tub so big the three men in the tub could fit in it, is nothing more than corn syrup which your brain loves. There is nothing more pleasing to your brain than sugar. Loves it. It has an addiction to it as it were heroin. Your brain would do anything to get its fix. You've heard it before, " the devil made me do it." That devil was nothing more than fructose, glucose, and sucrose.
So our tastes for everything from what we eat, to what clothes we buy to how we dress taught to us by the media. Music, movies, television, magazines, pictures...The idea of love, the idea of beauty, the idea of happiness all brought on by illusions. Pictures in our minds are illusions. I don't trust mine anymore. It seems that i have been a victim to illusions all my life and now I'm starting to see truth.
One thing about truth is once you see it you may wish you hadn't. See, truth is never easy. For we're constantly filtering things by our likes, dislikes, our past experience things we see, things we learned things our parents, siblings and friends do, like, say, etc. The list goes on. Plus there is never just one side to truth for in life there's duality. Two sides. Man and woman is truth; which one is right, they are both right. The sun and the moon is truth, light and darkness is truth. No matter how you look at it, truth has two sides. Its just hard to see them both at the same time and when you look at one then the other is a lie. Weird isn't it.
So my taste of what i like, what i want, is slowly changing. Its a new year, i feel anew in a way, not my old self anymore. The truth is setting me free
So now i must relearn what it is that i like. What I really like. What really makes me happy. Its like being a baby all over again. I'm not going to like something just because everyone else likes it, I'm not going to go along and hate something just because someone else tells me its bad. Gosh I miss Pee Wee Herman, bring him back...It takes courage to see truth to appreciate it to really know oneself is truth. My picture here is an illusion...and as the photographer, i created the lie...i am...
... the illusionist.
