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Weak XXXII

7 August 2020

No. 2,746 (cartoon)

I can see into the future.

No you can’t.

It’s just a series of presents.

8 August 2020

Mas Nacho

Elias told me his nascent courtship with Sophia is going predictably well if only because they’re in the initial stages of infatuation and projection.

“Last night she said she liked me because I wasn’t mas nacho,” he reported.

“Wow, she sure is besotted,” I replied. “You’re one of the cheesiest guys I know.”

“I’m afraid so,” he agreed. “I know we’re both going to have to sober up one of these days, but for now we’re enjoying drinking heavily from the fountain of wishful thinking.”

“Enjoy it while it lasts!” I advised.

I’m normally reticent to give anyone advice, especially when it comes to romance, but “enjoy it while it lasts” is always a good approach to take with anything and everything.

9 August 2020

Decomposing Banana

I was chopping up a rotting banana for a trip to the compost bin and was surprisingly pleased by how beautiful the decaying fruit was. I put it on a dirty plate and made a nice photograph.

Now what?

I have yet another nice photograph in my archive, but it’s not very satisfying. It’s hard to go wrong with anything halved, symmetry, and decaying organic matter, so incorporating all three into one image was too predictably visually pleasant to be at all rewarding.

10 August 2020

Roaming Cat Carcass, Thirty-year-old Corpse

Amelie called me a “mutt in a rut” and told me that I need to broaden my horizons by “thinking outside the catbox.” And in case her canine and feline references weren’t sufficiently annoying, she sent me an article from Molecular Diversity Preservation International, “A Case Report of a Botulism Outbreak in Beef Cattle Due to the Contamination of Wheat by a Roaming Cat Carcass: From the Suspicion to the Management of the Outbreak.”

I didn’t read it. If the Swiss publishers couldn’t tell me everything I needed to know in a thirty-word headline it’s clear that they can’t write and/or edit.

If you’re looking for a good headline, here ya go: “Thirty-year-old corpse discovered in cellar of €35m Paris mansion.” We’re all asking the same question: is that the body of a thirty-year-old person or a body that’s been dead for thirty years?

As for the answer ... oh, never mind. See what I mean? With a great slug like that, who cares?

11 August 2020

The Elusive Perfect Sentence

Lina asked me if I wanted to hear the best line from her novel in progress. I told her I’d prefer to wait until the work is published; I didn’t add that was because that day will never come.

She ignored my reply to her rhetorical question and subjected me to it anyway: “And with an almost imperceptible wave of her impossible thingie it disappeared.”

I took the bait; I just couldn’t help myself from walking into the mire.

“What impossible thingie?” I asked.

“That’s the problem,” she replied, “I just don’t know. I was originally going to use ‘penishand’ but thought that was too racy.”

(Racy?!)

“I’d think any non sequitur or something surreal would do,” I suggested.

“No, you don’t understand,” she corrected. “It has to be the perfect thing to make it the perfect sentence.”

“Maybe you should work on the rest of the novel while you let your thoughts about the thingie gestate,” I proposed.

That didn’t go over well; she admitted that searching for the perfect sentence was as far as she’d progressed. The next step after that would be to decide whether the perfect sentence should be the first or final one.

I ended that thread of our conversation by offering to take a flattering photograph of her for the back cover of the book when the publisher requested one. (I’m always eager to volunteer for tasks I’ll never be asked to do.)

Thinking about writing, talking about writing, debating about writing, et cetera is so much easier than actually writing. Lina understands that, but there’s a huge chasm between knowing something and admitting it.

12 August 2020

The Best

The Guardian publishes a regular feature, “Some Photographer’s Best Photograph.” Today’s image featured Aubrey Powell’s commercial shot of a man on fire commissioned for a 1975 album cover. The article recalled the story of the huge production featuring a stunt man who was, in fact, on fire. (He lost an eyebrow and half a mustache, all in a day’s work in Hollywood.)

The whole shoot seems rather quaint in retrospect since today it’s trivial to depict someone covered in flames using a computer-imaging program without singeing a single hair.

When it comes to notable photographs of people alight, I can’t think of a more significant one than Malcolm Browne’s 11 June 1963 image of Thich Quang Duc, a Vietnamese monk, immolating himself on a public street. Powell’s shot helped a huge corporation sell a lot of music; Browne’s images shaped the course of history.

And that finally—finally!—brings me to the point of my petty diatribe. The whole point of looking through decades of someone’s work and picking out the “best” piece is ludicrous. And it gets ludicrouser: there are battalions—no, make that brigades—of buffoons arguing about which single frame of a classic film is the “best.” Yep, people who aren’t clinically brain dead bickering about which of the over fourteen thousand single still images from a hundred-minute movie is “the best.”

There’s no point in ridiculing the numbskulls; they’re doing a great job without any help from me.

I shall now conclude on a hypocritical note and say what the best work of my life is. The answer is easy; it’s been the same since I was a teenager: the piece I’m doing tomorrow.

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©2020 David Glenn Rinehart