Anytime the train rolls through some sad Podunk town, it’s almost guaranteed there will be at least one person waiting with a phone or camera to record our passing visit.
I’ve never understood how they know when to show up, or if they just wait around for hours in anticipation, but I admire their tenacity and commitment.
More than once, I’ve prayed for them as their lives enter my view for a moment, then vanish into memory just as quickly.
I may be projecting, but I often feel a deep kinship with those strangers.
I can usually see a longing in their eyes to flee the shitty little world that imprisons them, and it reminds me of the many long years of my life when I felt the same.
I, too, was stuck in oppressive, shithole towns in the middle of nowhere, desperate to break free and wander to wider spaces beyond the familiar.
It’s shocking how long it took me to escape that narrow existence, and I could never thank God enough for getting me the fuck out.
Even now, I bristle at the thought of being limited and confined, as I have been for much of my life.
In hindsight, it’s been necessary: Only when your soul has been sufficiently smothered does it begin to burn with an unquenchable fury to release those who are also trapped and desperate for hope.
What galls me the most is that so many people enjoy being suppressed and captive. As a citizen of the United States, that has become abundantly clear.
A good chunk of humanity finds comfort in keeping their worlds small, limited, and controlled, surrendering their lives to two-bit demons who squelch their power for the illusion of safety and normalcy.
For those people, I have no sympathy—they’ve chosen to bargain with darkness, and their lives are an abhorrent waste.
But for those lone lights who yearn for something greater, whose souls hope and pine for freedom and autonomy, my heart is with you. May God grant you the release you seek.
I recently stopped at the pretty little welcome center on the highway to the Carolina mountains. When I pulled into the parking lot, I immediately recognized his car: a beaten-up old Subaru covered in bumper stickers.
We passed each other as I walked into the restroom. I looked into his pretty eyes, smiled, and said, “Hey, man!” in as friendly a tone as I’ll ever use.
His puzzled look suggested he couldn’t place me, but he politely smiled, nodded, and said, “Hello” softly.
Truthfully, if I hadn’t seen his car, I wouldn’t have recognized him either: his hair is long and shaggy now, as is mine, and he has a full, thick beard, slightly graying in spots. When we worked together six or seven years ago, we were smooth-shaven and clean-cut—I guess we both rebelled against the corporate world.
The moment was awkward but entirely in keeping with whatever our relationship had been before.
On paper, it should have worked: we were both introverted, although he was even quieter than I was. He was always polite, smiled a lot, and seemed to have no beef with anyone, although no one really knew much about him either. The same could have been said about me—except for the polite and smiling part.
I’d worked with plenty of deep introverts before, and we usually fell into a nice, silent rhythm with each other. We might not have talked our heads off, but we often developed an unspoken rapport.
For some reason, he and I never found it.
He was physically beautiful: piercing blue eyes, blond hair, lean and muscular. His only interests seemed to be the mountains, or at least, that’s all he ever wanted to talk about. He apparently spent his weekends climbing and solo hiking in the Appalachians—and not much else.
I appreciate the mountains, but mostly from roadside overlooks, and I don’t need to form my life around them as some people do.
It wasn’t just our lack of shared interests, though: everything about our dynamic was mismatched. We never had in-depth conversations, but we often had a strange habit of speaking at the same time, looking at each other with confused faces, and saying, “Wait, what?”
I never understood his thought process: he’d blurt out a random question or comment with no obvious connection to the subject at hand, which frequently threw me off track.
He was placid, gentle, and seemed utterly without guile. Sometimes he appeared visibly shaken by my way of barking orders, misinterpreting my direct, forceful demeanor as a personal attack.
Our approaches to work were also fundamentally different: he meandered along without any obvious plan and savored the moment; I just wanted to get shit done.
I tried to make him laugh, but it was nearly impossible; he certainly never picked up on my sarcastic humor. I concluded that he was both sincere and sincerely boring.
Sometimes I’d see him with an airy, dreamy look in his eye, and then he’d quietly chuckle to himself, recalling some memory that I doubt he could even crystallize into words—I’m not sure he’d want to, either.
In truth, it appeared he was blissfully content in a bubble of his own making. I’ve lived a life of near-solitude, but it hasn’t been for lack of trying—he seemed entirely enchanted by the reclusiveness of his mind.
I felt like I should know the guy because he seemed fundamentally decent, but that magic spark of connection was missing, and I gave up on the idea. Another co-worker told me later that he, too, tried to connect with him, but had no success—I was glad I wasn’t alone.
I imagine he still visits the mountains every weekend, and I wonder if he’ll ever find someone who can draw anything from him—or maybe he’s truly content to wander the earth alone.
Are all human beings wired for connection, or were some of us born with a missing link?
Photography may be an art, but it’s one of the lowest forms.
To me, all art is mental shit anyway, simply the waste of whatever a person’s mind has recently consumed, reeking with the stench of their own odious beliefs and illusions.
Photography, in particular, is such a flimsy, throwaway medium—a single moment in time captured, but like most moments, easily discarded and forgotten.
At a time when humans absorb a steady stream of images in every waking moment, the value of a single photograph is less than nothing.
It’s amusing how pretentious so many photographers are about their so-called craft—the most spectacular image may grab a person’s attention for a second or two, tops, before they scroll past and immediately forget it.
Your pretty picture isn’t important, and no one gives a shit about it but you.
Needless to say, I don’t identify as a photographer, and I’m certainly no artist. I’m not attaching my ego to that kind of nonsense.
I consider architectural photography to be the same as pornography. Just like all dicks and vaginas run together after you’ve seen a thousand of them, one building looks much like another after you’ve photographed your first few hundred.
A structure may look appealing in a certain light or at a particular angle, but few are truly exceptional, and I’m always delighted to find the standouts. Even then, they’re just buildings—decaying monuments to human fragility and arrogance, all shaped in the same basic forms.
To me, photography is all about understanding light and shadow, and in order to be any damn good at capturing the light, you can’t be afraid to confront the shadow. Period.
I don’t have a mind for technicalities, and I don’t give a fuck about shutter speeds, Canon vs. Nikon, or whatever other wankery photographers obsess over to make themselves feel special.
For more than twenty years, I used cheap point-and-shoot cameras because that’s all I could afford. I was only able to buy a DSLR camera a few years ago, and it was one of the least expensive ones I could find.
Many of my pictures have been taken with a phone, especially interior shots, because God knows people freak out if you use a camera inside a building.
Nothing reveals the irrational stupidity of the human mind quite like photography. Snap a bunch of pics with a phone, and no one blinks an eye. Pull out an actual camera, and they suddenly think you’re a terrorist.
Photography long ago tapped into an anti-authoritarian streak that lay dormant in me, and over time, has magnified that rebellion into a defining personality trait.
I’ve been chased down too many times by power-hungry security guards and angry homeowners too dumb to understand that photography in public spaces is still perfectly legal in the United States—one of the few freedoms we have left in this dictatorial shambles we call a free country.
You’re gonna come after me in your car and threaten to call the police for taking pics of your ugly old house from the sidewalk? Like it isn’t all over Google Maps, Zillow, real estate websites, or the local tax assessor’s site, where I can see photos, floor plans, your full name, and how much you overpaid for that pile.
In fact, that’s how I plan my shots in advance—by carefully studying your house online. Trust me, I don’t want to have to fuck around outside your place any longer than necessary.
I’m only observing the facade of your house, which will likely outlast your insignificant carcass. Go console yourself by meditating on your property value, which is probably the only thing you have to show for your pathetic excuse of a life.
And don’t give me shit about how you’re scared because crime’s gotten so bad in your neighborhood—crooks are dumb as hell; they’re not out carefully taking pictures like it’s some insipid espionage film. I don’t indulge my fears, and I’m not entertaining your dark fantasies either.
It was particularly amusing in the years when Atlanta was busy trying to convince the world it was the new Hollywood (it wasn’t, and never will be). People who whored out their homes for some film production didn’t mind if a sex scene was shot in their bedroom, but got mad if a guy out front was taking pics with his little camera. Fuck off with that nonsense.
So far at least, the power-tripping theatrics I’ve encountered in the field have been exclusive to the Southeast, where the reigning mythology hasn’t shifted much from the slavery days—even in Atlanta, which cloaks itself in a progressive veneer but is essentially rooted in the same old top-down system of patriarchal control.
It’s only in the Deep South where I get the distinct feeling that people view public photography as some existential threat to their fragile little social order.
I can’t count how many times I’ve had to soothe some angry Southerner by smiling sweetly, pulling out the old drawl, and saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” accompanied by some groveling song-and-dance to sufficiently demonstrate that I know my place.
Then I just go back when they’re gone and finish the job.
On one of my first visits to New York, a cop walked up to me while I was photographing a building. Oh, great, here we go, I thought, and then he whipped out his phone and started showing me his own street photography.
Much of it has to do with the size of a place: in cities of actual consequence, where people’s lives are engaged in meaningful activity, no one even notices a guy with a camera.
It’s the dead podunk towns I dread the most, where people are in thrall to fear and have nothing better to do than to get up in your business—or threaten your life, as happened to me once when I returned to take pictures in the shithole where I grew up.
“I’ve got a gun on me,” big boy growled in that familiar twang I despise. Welcome backto hell, I thought.
Photography is lonely work, mentally demanding, physically exhausting, and I find little glory in it. I have no emotional attachment to it, but over time, the process has become a spiritual discipline for me, essentially a form of meditation.
In the best moments, I feel like I can capture a spark of the divine imagination, especially when the subject is one that my soul connects with—anything by G.L. Norrman, for example.
For better or worse, photography is one of the things I was put on this earth to do, and I’ll keep plugging away at it despite its attendant perils and frustrations.
Everyone thinks Jupiter is so great, and yeah, he’s full of generosity, but he can be kinda blustery, too. He certainly makes a big deal out of things, but sometimes it’s just hot air.
Venus is pleasant, I guess, but that’s about all I can say of her—In truth, I find her a little weak.
TheSun is bright and independent, and I enjoy his company immensely. As he told me years ago, though, “We come when we like.” No use chasing after royalty.
The Moon and I are practically inseparable, although I hesitate to admit it: Up and down I go with her like the tides, passing through a different phase every night—or each hour, more like it.
Neptune is too weird and aloof for me to fathom: He’s just there, drifting along in the ether.
Mercury is my good friend: Quick, sharp, and incisive. Uranus, on the other hand, knocks me out in a single jolt, but always keeps things spicy.
Pluto is my homeboy: dark, stealthy, forever destroying and evolving. I just let him do his thing.
Mars and I are tight: I like his unique and feisty spirit, and he’s always had my back.
Saturn is the one that gets the most undeserved hate. Why so many fear him is beyond me.
He’s strict but kind, relenting but never destructive. He demands good work and wants it delivered, but he’s not a perfectionist either.
If you’re lazy, I suppose, you won’t get very far with him, but if you put in the work, he’ll revel with you in your accomplishment.
Each of them I admire in different ways, but let it be known that this man will forever be Saturn’s child.
Some mornings, I wake up remembering a flurry of odd, seemingly unrelated moments from the past. A few came to mind today.
The first two were from my long-ago church days: same church, different pastors.
For some reason, the first pastor took a half-hearted interest in me, and in hindsight, it was a little odd. He was married to a woman, but his manner was notably effeminate.
Sometimes after a service, he’d invite me into his office and ask me how my week had been, how my family was doing, and dumb shit like that.
I was in my early 20s and fairly naive, but he never acted inappropriately—I just didn’t understand what his goal was.
I do remember that he was usually very distracted, and when I was in his office, he’d often be on the phone, working at his computer, or talking with other people in the room while I just sat there, silent and confused.
One time, he invited me into his office and absently rattled off the same old questions: “How ya been, man? How’s your mother?” As I started to answer, I noticed he wasn’t paying me a bit of attention.
Instead, he pulled out a giant checkbook from his desk and began writing a check for an amount that seemed obscene to my broke ass—at least in the high hundreds, if not more. I was making $7 an hour back then, so I took notice.
As he wrote the check, he was talking under his breath—whether to himself or both of us, I couldn’t tell, but it was loud enough for me to hear.
“Since the secretary’s not here, we’ll just forge it,” he said in a nonchalant, sing-song tone, scribbling her name on a check that obviously required the signatures of two different people.
I haven’t thought of that moment in probably 20 years. What the hell was I witness to? Well, besides a pastor committing check fraud.
Shortly later, the pastor left the church in a swirl of drama that had nothing to do with money—at least, not that I’m aware of. Churches are skilled at concealing such things, though.
The next pastor was the kind of slick con artist that populates pulpits everywhere. Looking back, there were a ton of red flags around him from the beginning.
When he came to the church, the “board of elders” (a.k.a. a group of successful businessmen) failed to tell the congregation that the dude resigned from his previous position after he was caught in a sleazy motel with the wife of one of his staff members. I learned that later from someone who attended his old church.
The guy was a smarmy piece of shit whose sermons were basically a string of hammy remarks and incredulous stories that he clearly pulled from the folds of his asshole.
He was great at crowd work, and I think he secretly wanted to be a comedian, but he was obviously sly enough to know that fleecing a flock was a steadier gig than working the comedy circuit.
When the pastor came to town, I’d just moved into my first apartment and didn’t own any furniture. Somehow, word got back to him that one of his congregants was in need, so he generously offered to loan me an air mattress he’d recently purchased.
“Try not to get it dirty, though,” he said as he handed me the box. “I’m returning it to Target in a couple of weeks for a refund, and I’m gonna tell them it wasn’t used.”
Needless to say, he was later forced to resign when he had an affair with one of the women in the congregation. I think he became a motivational speaker or some such huckster bullshit.
The one memory that sears my brain the most is from maybe seven or eight years ago. Early one Saturday morning, I was taking pictures in Downtown Atlanta and stopped inside the Marriott Marquis to piss.
The hotel was packed with attendees of a Christian conference, and appeared to be sold out.
I always get a cheap thrill from riding in the hotel’s glass elevators, so I stepped inside one, and behind me followed a tiny Asian girl—obviously a prostitute. When you live in Atlanta, you know what they look like. She was maybe five feet tall and appeared to be, at most, 16.
As the elevator shot up the atrium, the gears of my mind began turning: why the hell is a prostitute at a church conference?
The elevator opened at the 47th floor, and we both stepped out. She turned to the left, and I went to the right, secretly watching her from across the atrium.
She walked up to the double doors of one of the hotel’s executive suites and quietly knocked. One of the doors slowly opened just enough for her to slip inside, then quickly closed behind her.
I don’t know who she was about to fuck, but I can hazard a guess: probably some hot-shot pastor who was paid a small fortune to make an appearance there.
A few minutes later, I rode back down to the atrium level and, as I stepped off the elevator, I walked past a small group of teenagers, likely a church youth group.
A young girl, maybe 16, came running up to a guy who looked slightly older than the rest of them—maybe he was the youth pastor.
The girl’s face was flushed, and her eyes were glazed over as she babbled excitedly: “The most wonderful thing that could ever happen to a Christian has happened to me. I’ve been filled with the Holy Spirit and received the gift of tongues.”
I’m not even gonna touch the “speaking in tongues” and “filled with the Spirit” nonsense—that’s a rabbit hole best avoided.
I’d long left the church and Christianity behind at that point, but it sickened me to the core to witness faithful adherents at the bottom bleating and braying about God, utterly oblivious to the fact that, in that very moment, in the same building, one of their leaders was likely being serviced by an underage prostitute.
It also infuriated me to know that if the truth were revealed to them, about half would simply deny it, and the other half would excuse it with a wave of the hand. “God uses imperfect vessels,” “David lusted after Bathsheba and was a man after God’s own heart”, blah blah blah.
I was raised in the church and spent decades there—I know exactly how Christians have been conditioned to respond to a lack of integrity.
When a leader’s hypocrisy and deception are exposed, a few might shed performative tears and blubber something about repentance, but when the next lying sack of shit comes along, they’ll still fall at his feet in awe and reverence.
Many will immediately refute it and insist on living in tenuous fantasy, reasoning to themselves that their denial and self-deception are the substance of “faith.”
Often, a lack of integrity is met with a shrug or even tacit approval. Although few have the balls to admit it, most Christians love that their leaders are as disingenuous and deceitful as they are, dealing in darkness while claiming holiness.
It’s been disheartening, but not surprising, to watch the so-called Christians of the United States gaze admiringly at a convicted felon, pedophile rapist, con artist, compulsive liar, malignant narcissist, and all-around piece of shit—the absolute antithesis of Christ—and say, “Yep, that’s our guy!”
Not once, but twice, no less.
America’s toxic, bastardized version of Christianity is so far removed from the teachings of Christ that the nation’s so-called Christians wouldn’t recognize Jesus if he were standing in front of them. In fact, they would utterly revile him for his simplicity and purity of spirit—and his brown skin.
It’s become quite fashionable for American Christians to whine about Satan, demons, and spiritual attacks—an obvious narcissistic shortcut to absolve themselves of their own poor decisions and lack of moral conscience.
You’re the real demons, motherfuckers. Your choice to deal with darkness is your own and yours alone, and you delight in it. Grow the fuck up and admit it.
Nor is the phenomenon exclusive to Christians: The citizens of the United States are, on the whole, a dishonest and duplicitous people who despise truth, subsist on catastrophic fantasy, and hide behind a veneer of moralizing self-righteousness that is repulsive and exhausting.
As an American, I’ve learned to ignore everyone’s words because they mean jackshit. Everyone’s lying to themselves and each other, and the more you bleat about your little titty-baby theories and claim moral superiority, the more I know you’re a blithering, willful idiot—it’s just that simple.
Years of disillusionment have taught me to scrutinize a person’s actions carefully. It’s the tiny decisions we make that reveal everything about our character, and I promise you, every choice we make, no matter how small, is being watched and evaluated. That’s the shit we’re being judged on—not our meaningless beliefs.
What I look for now in my fellow humans is even a shred of integrity. Sadly, I find little of it.
I stopped by the old school this morning. I barely remembered what it looked like.
Several large classroom trailers obscured the building where I once learned—every spare inch of the lawn was covered.
It was only then that I realized how many are in training now: much more than when I began.
The path to the school was once wide and open, but has been reduced to a narrow, meandering maze, every twist and turn haphazardly lined with flimsy chain-link fence.
I noticed a young woman walking down the front steps. I had the distinct impression that her training was complete.
I watched as she followed the zig-zag path alone, striding down the long hill with determination.
At the bottom of the hill, a pathetic group of men had congregated by the gymnasium. They weren’t boys, but they sure acted like it— talking and joking together, making snide comments about the people passing by.
Why are those guys just hanging out here? I wondered. They had never moved on.
The men intentionally blocked the young woman’s path, but she cut right through them, ignoring their crude remarks and domineering behavior.
As she went out into the world, the boys immediately returned to their play and forgot about her.
I, too, knew it was time to walk that path.
There’s no reason to come back here, I told myself. Training time is over.
When the power goes out, there are two kinds of people: those who keep running their damn mouths and the ones who go silent.
The loud ones will waste their breath whining and lamenting their fate; the quiet ones will find sustenance in the sacred pause.
Choose carefully who you traverse with in the darkness: the loud ones only know fear, while the quiet ones follow the light of inner guidance.
When the power returns—and it always does—the loud ones, having learned nothing, will still wallow in the familiar din, suppressing their souls in meaningless babble.
The quiet ones will move on to the next destination, having found strength in their acceptance of the disruption.
That well of love and compassion that stirs for those who will never return it.
I’ll try not to bore you with psycho-babble, but it naturally formed in my youth, as the deepest wounds do for all of us.
I can vividly remember being a child who pined for the love and closeness of an absent father—
Not physically absent, at first, but certainly emotionally.
As a little boy, I wanted so badly to hold his hand and be skin-to-skin with him, but he was cold and distant, apparently uninterested in me.
It wasn’t a surprise when he later confessed that his life would have been better if I hadn’t been born—tough words to hear from a parent, but at least he was honest.
He was apparently shocked when I cut off communication with him years ago and never looked back. Such arrogance.
My mother cloaks herself in a veneer of warmth and compassion as a means of survival, but she’s just as disinterested in anyone else unless they indulge her infantile sense of helplessness.
She smothers her enablers to keep them close, but invariably drives them away with her petulant demands and domineering behavior that become more apparent over time.
In many ways, I find her selfishness even more pernicious than my father’s—his was blatant, but hers deceived me for years as genuine concern and nurturing.
We’re all amateur psychologists these days, so you can probably guess that I’ve wasted most of my life pursuing one-sided, dead-end relationships with people who don’t give a fuck about me—or are incapable of doing so—repeating the old pattern established between myself and my parents.
From the perspective of middle age, I have to acknowledge that none of my so-called friendships in adulthood have been reciprocal or satisfying.
There was the cagey online buddy who only wanted to talk in chat and threatened suicide once to get my attention. There was the raging narcissist who emotionally tormented me and then nearly killed me—I moved over 200 miles to get away from him. There was the smooth-talking coworker who kept me around to help him with his projects, but dropped me like a hot rock when his position changed.
Then there are all the people I’ve desperately wanted as my friends and companions, but it was abundantly clear they just weren’t interested. In my wild imagination, I could picture us embraced in some epic, earth-shaking partnership, but none of them shared that vision. Most of them probably never gave my existence a half-second of thought.
Always haunting my relationships are the questions of my sexuality. Am I gay? Am I asexual? Who the fuck knows? Do I want a friend or a lover? I’ve never fully understood that myself, and while I’ve grown to accept the ambiguity, I’ve never found anyone else who could handle it.
I used to think it was a weakness that I could fall head over heels for people who would never do the same for me. I used to be ashamed of it. I’m not anymore.
I may have been the boy who idealized and defended their parent as a way to cope with the absence of affection, but as a man, it’s given me the ability to not just passionately love people, but to deeply cherish them with a child-like simplicity and purity—even when they don’t deserve it.
Experience has given me the ability to recognize when I’m being lured into another unrequited relationship—the signs are all familiar to me now.
I know when my baby brain wants to elevate a flawed mortal into a peerless daddy god with whom to form a perfect union, and I’ve become adept at ruthlessly scrutinizing a person’s life and character for misalignments with my own.
What’s different about me now from even a few years ago is that I don’t dismiss the tender feelings of the little boy inside me.
Rather, I gently take his hand, and we take a walk together. I listen to him intently as he talks excitedly about that special person who, in the moment, means the absolute world to him. I pick him up, hold him close, and kiss his forehead, thanking him for his sweetness, innocence, and kindness.
Then I harness that essential eros for a moment of culmination and truth delivered expressly for that person—it may be a favor, a conversation, or just a passing remark.
The form of the message is unimportant: what matters is that it was especially made for one with whom I have become so enamored, packed with such a concentrated force of love and grace that it cuts through their soul like a blade.
When the message is delivered, it’s as if some spell has been broken inside of me, and with a sudden jolt, I realize, That’s it. You’re done. And I walk away, thanking God for that person whose life may be entwined with another’s—but it isn’t mine.
It could be that I wasn’t built for genuine relationships. That’s a sobering reality I’ve come to terms with in the last few years.
Maybe my purpose on this earth is to deliver a seed of love to those who are otherwise impenetrable to receive it, never seeing its effect, or even knowing if it has an effect at all.
That could be my childish way of coping with the absence of affection in adulthood, but I do know that every transmission of grace deepens my soul’s capacity for love—for myself more than anyone else.
