learning curve.

Nothing assures you how much you've been looking ahead until you're given the chance to look back, and everything feels unfamiliar. Even though I had considered just letting them burn up in the figurative house fire that was once my reality, I recently got a hold of books and books of parsed through old pictures. Most of them were taken during my 35mm period, clinically representing various holidays, events, and plenty of random fill-time - many of them surprisingly date stamped.

I had wanted to be a filmmaker since before my voice cracked, and the still camera became the settled for alternative. As I flipped the filmmaker’s spirit was clear, though often in weak soft focus or inadvertently less candid than intended, with interesting, odd angles, noticeable cross-cutting, and a quiet objective perspective. I showed up periodically with painted on grin, but the main meat of the ones I took show an outsider's point of view. Sappy movies always seem to offer voice-over and sound design for these unnecessary exposition moments where a character is strolling down the cul-de-sac of memory. I didn't have that.

I remember one Christmas in the early 2000s when my brother-in-law had filched an antiquated video camera from his place of employment. I used it to film my niece as she grew. I always loathed the camera person speaking on home movies, because I felt the acoustics were unnatural. Add this standpoint to my general mental and emotional disposition of the time to a Christmas video from that year, and you might garner that I was quickly able to displace myself from the holiday altogether.

I was taken aback by how many pictures of my parents there were and how with all of the rough ground my relationship with them has traveled, how many of them I felt the need to keep. Then there was the whole collection of my nieces and nephews, save one, growing up at distance. I added a bundle of those to the stack that began to seem like something akin to an image flip book. Then there were the reunion pictures of one sort or another - all of them before the advent of Facebook, thus more cherished, at least at the time.

So many pictures passed before my eyes from this period recently. I wished for at least a few loops of archived audio to sneak into my brain, but nothing came. I couldn't for the life of me remember a single conversation had during any of these occasions, nor in many cases any details besides those present in the images.

I chose a stack to keep and parted with the rest.