My father has undertaken a seemingly spontaneous quest to convert a basement's worth of old family photographs to digital media. A highly technical task, to be sure; apparently he developed a clever means of transposition, circumventing the seemingly insurmountable physiological barriers between matter and energy by holding his digital camera really, really close to the paper.
Images akin to the one above have been flooding my inbox for the past few days, and I'm starting to wonder if this project might be a therapeutic means of dealing with the much-hyped "empty nest" syndrome I'v heard so much about. I also wonder why I'm wearing flannel. Then I remember I grew up in New Jersey, a hellish tundra so cold that in the winter they told us stories of pioneers boiling rocks just to have something warm to drink. You might think the stories of "rock soup" were just tall tales told to entertain children; I'm here to tell you that shit was real. Ever wonder why there aren't many elderly in Jersey? It's because most of them died trying to get to school in winter. They fell, cold and numb, their bodies providing a natural staircase up the hill to the schoolhouse. That's what it means to be from Jersey; it means that back in your day, you had to walk to school barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways, over the corpses of the weak. "Garden State" my ass.


I've lost thirteen pounds since I moved up here, and I managed to screw up my back so badly in the gym Friday that I spent most of the weekend hobbling about in a pose reminiscent of homo erectus with, well, a fucked-up back. I love San Francisco, but I think it's trying to kill me.