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!

For the past few years, I’ve been working hard to reduce my overall screen time, and one of the things I have recently begun to do is to read paper magazines again. You know, sometimes I have an idea for something and I have no idea how it’ll turn out until I do it, and I had an inkling how this might turn out but I can never be sure how it will turn out, but now that I have all my magazines together for the first time, I am ecstatic at how this idea turned out. Turning off my phone, tossing it aside, and reading a nice article in the New Yorker or an interesting interview in the Paris Review has been so much fun. I received the London Review of Books just today so I haven’t been able to dig into yet, but I will, and I’m eager to try it out.

Moral of the story: turn off your screens and hold paper and ink again.

Two years ago, I made a deal with myself: write. Show up every day and write. Two years ago, I began to fill my first A5 Leuchtturm1917 notebook, and on Sunday night, I finished my fifteenth notebook. In May, I designed and ordered my perfect notebook box, and my design was for each box to hold fifteen notebooks. On Sunday night, I finished my first notebook box, as well.

These last two years have flown by, and I’ve documented all of it in these fifteen notebooks. Every up, every down, every great day and every mediocre day: it’s all in these notebooks. And I love that. My output here has definitely decreased over the last two years, but I haven’t stopped writing. In fact, I’m writing more than ever, and I couldn’t be any happier.

It really feels like I’m just getting started, too. So let’s keep going.

A fog has descended over the valley, and it’s driving all of us insane. I’ve felt like a daredevil driving to work in the mornings, pointing my car forward and hoping I don’t hit another car, tumble down a ditch, or miss my turn. It’s kept me young.

I had to remind myself how to do this. How to publish something online again. I had been thinking about this space, about what I wanted from it, but I’ve been focused on living, on trying to enjoy each day as it comes, to focus on now, on this breath, because in the end, ‌I will only have one last breath before I leave this world breathless. I want to exhaust my life force completely and leave Death nothing but a bag of bones.

How’s that going? It’s going. There are times, small moments throughout my day, where I catch myself and become aware of the mask I’m wearing, the mask that transforms me into a robot, a machine following a prewritten set of instructions, without thought, without awareness, and I think, what am I doing? I’m playing a part, playacting for some audience I will never see. Why? What for? I don’t know. But I catch myself and I feel this deep and hollow and foreboding hole in my chest, and it scares me, so to feel better, I put on my mask and I let myself forget. I distract myself with all the distractions we’ve created for ourselves, and I tell myself I’ll try again tomorrow.

One day, there will be no more tomorrows, and on that day, I think I will finally feel peace. But until then, I have a life I want to live, feelings I want to feel, people I want to be with, places I want to see, art I want to create. As much as I’ve been writing in my notebooks, the essays I write on this site just feel different. There’s something about them that I can’t quite reproduce in my notebooks, and so I’m here, on this first post of 2024, and I don’t know I want to keep coming back here, writing my words, living my life without my mask. And I think that’s what I’ve been missing, to an extent. A chance where I can just be me, honest and true and fucked up like everyone else.

Or maybe this fog has driven me insane, and I don’t know who I am anymore.