Thank you, blogger Fandango, for today’s provocative question. It was time for a nice little stroll down memory lane.
This is the house where I grew up, 15825 Marlowe in Detroit, Michigan. This is a picture that I pulled today from Trulia, a real estate site.
My childhood home from Trulia, 2019
It’s a curious picture because that is what the house I grew up in looked like. Except that about ten or fifteen years ago, it fell into disrepair–there was a Google photo at the time, which showed broken windows and the door hanging off the front–from which I inferred it had probably become a crack house, given the date and location in what is now a not great region of Detroit. Somewhere I sequestered a photo from that date, though can’t find it at the moment because I don’t remember where I put it. Continue reading “Marlowe Palimpsest”
Tip of the iceberg of kajmeister books. All photos today by kajmeister.
I’m jumping on the bandwagon of shade. I am piling on the hate. I am a little chagrined to be joining such a chorus since, generally speaking, I try to avoid the herd mentality, but when it comes to dissing books, I can’t help it.
There’s a conversation going around about self-proclaimed expert tidier Marie Kondo and her aversion to anyone owning more than 30 books. Specifically….
She recommends keeping no more than 30 books in your collection, to be exact….”The idea is that if it sparks joy for you, you must keep it even if I go over to your home and I say, ‘Do you really want to keep this book?’ If you feel that it sparks joy for you, keep it with confidence.”–from “Marie Kondo Approved Ways to Get Rid of Your Books”
I was inspired with today’s word “camera” to share mostly photos rather than words, although some explanation is required. You see, I have a penchant when we travel for capturing the interaction between humanity and monuments. What tends to catch my eye is potential humanity, in particular, which is to say children being children.
The earth is 4.5 billion years old, humans around 6 million years, and civilization about 6,000, so you might say the rocks have it all over us. As Virginia Woolf once said,
The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.
–To the Lighthouse
Yet while we stand around in reverence, snapping photos of the million-year-old natural rock bridge or a Michelangelo masterpiece, children do what they do, which is to say play games, be naughty, and generally act as if they own the place. Which they do, in the most essential way. I first observed this at Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly back in 1993, where a late April water gully created a stream where a dozen Navajo children played. The sight of the massive rock edifice and 500-year-old abandoned Anasazi ruins carved out of the walls, set against the kids splashing water around and shrieking with laughter was both incongruous and perfectly natural. To me, it was like our genetic potential breathing.
Those are highfalutin’ ideas, but I frame them around this “photo essay” to help explain why these photos were taken in this way.
OK, it’s not Stonehenge, it’s Carhenge in Alliance, Nebraska. But wouldn’t be cool if you saw a toddler running through the sarsens erected by the ancient Celts?
Toddler at Carhenge, Nebraska. Photo by kajmeister.
