Seven Years – Time Again for Photo A Day

I gave up on the plague diaries, not because the plague has ended (oh ha! ha ha! How wonderfully naive such a thought would be!) but because it is just how we live – or die – now. If this blog is the only account of 2020 you can find, oh traveler from the future, then a) sorry about that and b) it was worse than you can even imagine. The country fell apart. It is continuing to fall apart as I write this, two tremulous days into a new year. There are vaccines but the federal government has not, of course, bothered to figure out how to distribute them; people are refusing to take the vaccines; people are still refusing to wear masks and on and on, while the cases rise and rise and rise. 57 confirmed tests here in little Clatsop County in the last three days. Three days.

But we’re all about opening up and keeping the economy going! I, myself, got a job, a good, real full time job where I have to wear a mask all day. I get to work from home a couple days a week, usually, to sort of try to minimize my risks, but it is probably only a matter of time and I’m terrified. And exhausted. The day in, day out, yes there is a plague, wear a mask all day, work all day, try not to be terrified of the grocery store, try not to freak out about the unmasked oil change guy, oh and, by the way, try not to be alarmed by the slow, slow coup which the “president” is still attempting and the news, all of which is dire, and so on. I have retreated into my turtle shell and I just gave up even trying to blog about it.

However! That is not what this is about! This is about a New Thing, or, rather, an Old Thing reborn. In 2007 I did a Photo A Day project and while the photos are no longer available on the internet (it’s a long story in which I do not come off well, so we will skip it, but suffice it to say that I am a goddamn idiot sometimes) I do have a softcover book. In 2014 I did it again and you can see it right here on this blog. And now, it is 2021 and I am doing it yet another time.

In 2007 I had to take photos with my camera – my old Canon Rebel, already old then – because my phone was not a camera then. I had to upload them to Flickr. I had to then connect them from Flickr to my old blog, The Hangover Journals. (damn, it’s still there, whoa.) You can look for them there but it’s all disorganized and they weren’t all posted. It was like walking three miles to school in the snow! Uphill! No. No it wasn’t, it wasn’t hard at all, but it got easier when I did it in 2014 and I could just email photos from my phone to the desktop computer. It is the same now, but my phone takes much better pictures. So much better that I think this time around I will not use my actual camera for this project. I think I want it to be snapshots. Immediacy, that’s the watchword, immediacy and square format and here is my daily life, 365 photos to come: a new life, in a new place.

So I have created a new page which you will see up there and I have put up two pictures from two extremely wet rainy could have been miserable walks. They were not miserable though because I kind of like rain and I especially like coming home from the rain and getting dried off and having a glass of wine and thinking LO FOR I AM MIGHTY I have walked in the motherfucking RAIN like a WARRIOR. A really dumb warrior who didn’t just stay home like a sensible person, that is.

It is 2021 and here we go.