Another slow kind of day where I didn’t do much. What I did do was something I’ve been procrastinating on for a few months, and that’s processing the photos I took on my road trip from back in April. I shot a few thousand photos during the trip, and I only recently whittled that down to about 300. Before, my workflow would then consist of editing each RAW file in Capture One over many hours across many days (or weeks, in this case), and I just wasn’t feeling that anymore. I could even foresee how much this problem would intensify during the trip, as I invested in styles for Capture One that I hoped would make editing quicker, but there was something about them didn’t quite jibe with me, so I quickly abandoned that idea.

Because I was getting tired of editing, I began to finally play around with recipes for my Fujifilm cameras, and I quickly took to it. Like, almost immediately. This was exactly what my photography was missing, as I explained a bit in my post from when I went to Kerr Dam last month. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing with Fuji’s X RAW STUDIO app, and even though it is slightly buggy, I really like it. It’s very easy to create recipes with it and even easier to assign them to specific slots on my camera. If you put two and two together, then you can see where my head is at: I began to apply some of my favorite recipes for the X-T4 onto the photos I took during my road trip, and they have been coming out a lot better than I could have imagined. And what’s cool about the X RAW STUDIO app is that you can play around with exposure, highlights, and shadows and apply some nice edits to the photos. It doesn’t allow for cropping or straightening, which is a feature I would love it to have because then, I don’t think I would even need an app like Capture One anymore. And what’s cool, too, is that all this processing happens on the camera itself, so it’s kinda like I took those photos with those specific simulations while I was out and about. Not quite, but close.

I’m not finished processing these photos because, again, I’ve been lazy today, but the photos I have processed look pretty good, and that makes me happy and every excited to both finish and to head out on the road again. I’m super excited about that.

A lazy day at home. Earlier this week, I received this poster by Anderson Design Group, and I’d been looking at it on and off today. For a big part of my adult life, when I thought of traveling, I always thought of traveling overseas: Europe, Asia, Australia. During my road trip in April, however, I realized how much of America I haven’t seen and how much of it I want to see. So I bought this poster to remind me to explore America. On the wall facing this poster, I have more posters by Anderson Design Group that, in a way, tell my story. In order, I have city posters from San Diego, Los Angeles, Montana, Seattle, and Portland.

I now want to go east, and I think I settled on when: the first week of August. I don’t want to be around when my town hosts their annual Pioneer Days event; instead, I want to be on my way toward Chicago. I miss cities, and that feeling only intensified when I visited Seattle and Portland earlier this year. I’ve always wanted to visit Chicago, so that’s where I hope to be in a few weeks time. I’m not much of a planner, so the only thing I have to do next is to fill out my leave form at work. After that, who knows. I’ll hit the open road and see where the road takes me.

I learned recently that art history translates as storia dell’arte in Italian. The only significant thing about this is that I found it beautiful. Storia dell’arte. God dammit that sounds so beautiful to me. I had taken a few months off from my Italian studies, but I resumed them again this week, and I forgot how much fun it is to listen and to write and to speak in Italian. I love this language, and I wish I had more time to take it as seriously as I’d wish. I wish I had more time (and discipline) to do more, but at this stage in my life, I’d take what I can get.

It was a quiet day. I spent most of it inside my air conditioned office fixing more broken computers. I’ve made good progress this week, but mostly, it’s been full of solitude.

To break up the monotony, I walked around the neighborhood near my school a few times throughout the day. During one walk, I was greeted by an elementary school student playing with her sister in her yard. “Hi Mario,” she said, and just those words broke whatever melancholy I had been feeling at the moment. “How’s your summer going?” I asked her. “Good,” she said, then ran across her yard and began to play again. Later, I ran into a recent graduate and his girlfriend also going for a walk, and we waved and said our hellos. I returned to my office and cherished both my brief but valuable moments of human contact and the very refreshing AC.

On my way home from work, I decided to pull off and head toward the reservoir. I felt like I hadn’t been here for a while, but apparently, the last time I was here was last year on this exact same day. I went early in the morning then, and I went during the middle of the day today when temps were in the mid 90s. It was hot, but it was beautiful, and after I took some shots with my camera, I drove back onto the highway and made my way back home. After a few minutes, though, I had to pull off again.

I grabbed my notebook and began to write my feelings about what I had just experienced. What struck me the most was how decisive and nonchalant I was about this mini excursion. I had written about my anxiety before, and I thought of this again as I appreciated how far I’ve come over the years. I remember how tough it used to be for me to even get out of the house sometimes, and now I crave adventure.

I mentioned yesterday about the road trip through the Pacific Northwest I took in April, and I’m planning to head east sometime at the end of July or early August, and if the me of four years ago saw the me of now, I believe he would be proud. I am proud of how far I’ve come, and I am truly very excited to see what’s next.

Here’s to my next adventure.

“How do you like your Jeep?” the older lady asked me. We had both just parked at the grocery store lot, and as we walked toward the entrance, I said, “I love my Jeep.”

“I have a bucket a bolts for…” she thought for a minute, clearly annoyed, and said, “it’s a Jeep Patriot, right? I’ve had nothing but trouble with mine. I don’t recommend a Jeep to nobody.”

“The next car I buy will be a Jeep,” I said.

“Good luck with that,” she said and walked away.

I had seen this lady around town through the years, mostly on the road, mostly driving her Jeep Patriot, and I marveled again at how small the world feels sometimes. I recently took my Jeep on a road trip throughout the Pacific Northwest, and I had zero issues with it during it, but I like to believe that is because I like to take care of it. I’m not saying she didn’t, but as someone who deals with technology on a regular basis, I can tell when something is cared for and when something is not.

I spent most of the day taking apart Chromebooks, removing broken screens and installing working ones, diagnosing others and labelling them with my notes, and reinstalling ChromeOS and re-enrolling them to our school domain. There’s a simple pleasure in fixing things, and sometimes I wish other areas of my life were as easy.

Someone I deeply cared about broke up with me a few months ago, and for a reason I cannot articulate, she weighed heavily on my mind today. As I fixed one machine after another, I tried to find a way to fix this pain I’ve felt and have been feeling for a while. I considered scenario after scenario, but each one led me down the same path: it’s over, and I have to move on.

Some things can’t be fixed, no matter how much I try.

The National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory in my area for this coming Tuesday through Friday night. Forecasts predict triple digit temperatures, and if I still lived in San Diego, I might be annoyed but since I live in Montana, where the weather can fluctuate from snow one minute to sunny and clear skies the next, I am weirdly looking forward to 90 degree days again.

One way I will try and enjoy this heatwave is by driving in my nicely air conditioned car and listening to James A. Reeve’s newly launched Midnight Radio newsletter, “a dispatch of five thematic songs + a brief ramble delivered ‘round midnight on the first and fifteenth of each month.” His first broadcast is called, fittingly enough, Heatwave, and it is an incredible and eclectic mix of music with a whole lot of static and reverb. James has, if not the best taste in music, the coolest taste in music of anyone I know or follow. I’ve been reading his blog for many years now, and he ends many of his entries with a song that is usually new to me and very good. Both his blog and newsletter are great, and I recommend both.

“How do you keep creating something new on a regular basis?,” I asked Ganzeer in reply to a request he proposed in issue #206 of his amazing newsletter, Restricted Frequency. “I feel like I’m screaming into a void sometimes.” I didn’t expect him to reply, but there, in issue #207, he did:

The greater the void, the louder the scream must be, Mario.

Quite a few modes of creation do necessitate a great deal of solitude, and with that comes that sense of screaming into the void. It is more than a sense most of a time, but indeed a reality. I see no other way around it but to keep creating.

Keep creating, Mario, create all the things that are nagging at you to be made. Create them for no other purpose than their burning desire to exist. Keep at it, keep going, and keep creating until you have a big and strong enough body of work that cannot be ignored, no matter how vast the void may be. And more importantly, Mario, a body of work that you can be proud of, which I think is the most important thing of all.

Love your blog, btw.

Ganzeer

If this doesn’t make me write more, blog more, create more, than I don’t know what will.

I’ve been sitting here all day trying to put myself in the right frame of mind to write, I don’t know, this powerful essay, this heart-wrenching and deeply personal piece of writing that I would be proud to put out into the world, but I’ve been failing. I’ve been feeling my chest tighten and my mind racing for distraction all day, and I’ve been having a helluva time trying to reign it in and just write something. You know what helped? Reading some of my old blog posts from the summer of 2020. These essays were short and to the point, and as I re-read them for the first time in years, I remembered my mindset back then and my intention for this place:

This place is mine and I can write and create whatever I want.

I let myself get psyched out by false expectations. At some point over the last 2 to 3 years, I set the bar so high for myself that I simply stopped trying to reach it. I grew content letting this place languish, to let my, yes, talents go to waste, and why? I set the rules, and because I set the rules, I can also change them.

“Keep creating,” Ganzeer advised. That’s the only rule I need. Let’s go.

Yesterday I received my new camera and lens, the X-T50 and XF16-50mm kit lens, and I took both to Kerr Dam in Polson to try them out. This camera replaces my aging X-T20, a camera that will always have a special place in my heart because it was there with me when I rebooted this blog back in 2020. I loaded the Kodak Film film recipe from Fuji X Weekly into the X-T50, and I went at it.

All these photos are straight out of camera and have not been edited. Over the past few months I have been focusing my attention on trying to get the shot right in camera because I’ve become tired of editing photos, and this X-T50 does all I want and need out of a camera. I am in love, and I love how these photos turned out.

Also, I’m back, and it feels good to be back. I’m doing better. Thank you to everyone who reached out. You have no idea how much that meant to me. If I have it in me, I’ll write about my experiences from the last few months later this summer. Until then, thank you for reading and go enjoy the sunshine!