Dear J-

It’s sunset beneath the power lines that define our neighborhood as a tie line for San Diego Gas and Electric, straight north as the compass points, marching onward over canyon and sinners alike.

And yet … all I know is how lucky we are, incredibly lucky beyond our means. This life we lead isn’t full of jetpacks and flying cars like we thought 2012 would be, but it’s more than enough.

Mike

Dear J-

The best part of today has been knowing there’s no tomorrow at work for me. So more of this. Less of not seeing daylight in San Diego.

Mike

Dear J-

Just lately it has felt like this: this kid, or that kid. Not the two of them together, that’s too much (and CRAZY besides). Small doses. Little steps. We get through the week, blast through the weekends, and gear up for another round. Meanwhile they’re turning into little people. When did that happen?

Mike

Dear J-

So ready for this day to be done: there’s not a drop of energy left in me after work and two hours of kids reminding me of my age. Creak.

Mike

Dear J-

The twelve-hour days sneak up on you in strange ways: here I’m thinking about taking a nap while she’s had a busy morning and afternoon being sick in various ways (sleepy, vomit-y, sleepy, vomit-y, the cycle repeats) and it’s like I haven’t seen her for days, so changed are things.

Witness the glazed look, the slack face: all signs of YouTube, which we resort to at times to save a bit of sanity in our lives. And tomorrow we get to try again.

Mike

Dear J-

It’s hard to know EXACTLY what goes on in her head but I remember spending a lot of time perched on top of sofa backs when I was little, especially when they’re back-to-back like this: the risks of falling are fairly low and the consequences nearly insignificant at any rate: a soft landing and dirty looks from the employees.

Plus if they’re going to put sofas on wall hooks then the floor models are going to get beaten.

Mike

Dear J-

At least part of the reason why I don’t take better care of my car is that it hasn’t seemed to need it so far: despite my abuse, it’s held up well and (knock on wood) should last me quite a while longer. I went to the oil change today and instead of the one that’s closest to the house (with terrible reviews — everyone complains about how they try to upsell and I’ve been a victim of that too), tried one that got good reviews instead. The verdict? I’m sticking with the new place.

On the other hand they did tell me the timing belt was due and if I think right it’s really PAST due as I’m closing in on 150K miles and can’t remember ever having it changed. Um. Should be good enough to get me to work, right? On the way back to the house I spotted this Ramcharger (only sold en Mexico, as Dodge never brought that style to the States) and started thinking back to the other car that I’ve owned — the 1973 Super Beetle from high school.

Let’s see … I started driving that in 1990-91, so the car would have been … seventeen at that point. The ’97 Subaru I’m driving hits fifteen this year and that gives me some pause: how can the Beetle have seemed so primitive and the Impreza so modern in comparison? I suppose that even by 1973 standards the Beetle was a bit quaint, but I haven’t had the adventures I had in the Beetle with the Impreza, which I’m grateful for.

Mike

Dear J-

I keep all of our old photographs in a big cardboard box. Okay, it’s probably not that big (maybe twenty pounds worth, including the old not-so-sticky envelopes) as we don’t have that much depth to the photo archive, but I try to keep it all in one place. If I can, which is not always easy (good intentions and all; I run across old packets and mean to file them away with the others — and extract the negatives from the ones I haven’t already done, as I try to keep those somewhat safe in a binder (the binder is now full to overflowing; perhaps I can find a new one soon).

This leads to deep confusion about subjects and times. Years get crossed, and I have no way of figuring out what negatives go with what year until I sit down and kill an afternoon doing just this, and even then it’s not simple, as the dates I scrawl on the envelope are simply when the film got dropped off for development. In my heyday that would have been accurate to within a week. Towards the end of the 90s? That stuff would linger in cameras for years. I still have some rolls tied up in cameras, in fact, and no idea when or if I’ll ever finish them off. There is a romance to film, but there’s also a certain pain factor that means digital is easier: instantaneous is easier, and having more sharing options is usually easier too.

This is sort of a histogram: moving right in the picture goes back a year per stack — and 1996 (the big stack at the end) is actually split into two stacks. It occurs to me that the photographs trace my loneliness: I bought my first camera bare months before (April 1995) theVet and I started dating — July — and there’s a few rolls inside 1995 as I ran around taking shots of interesting things, later morphing into the desperation of 1996 (after leaving California in August the number of rolls exploded) and 1997 (four rolls from theVet’s graduation alone). And by 1998? Well, you don’t see it here but ’98 was when I bought a five-pack of Velvia and Kodalux mailers. That was my therapy that year: spend a Sunday in the Arboretum chasing the light from morning to dusk, thirty-six undeveloped pictures in the mail by Monday. Funny how I can believe I connect best with people through the eye of a lens. If I overstep it’s not because I want people to think hey, that’s funny. I want to know if you remember the same things I do. And that awful weight of 1996-98 is hard to bear alone.

Mike

Dear J-

The best part of having to work nights is the day after: sleep in very late, get up and walk the boy around the neighborhood. Here’s the path we traced today, thanks to Google Earth.

Mike

Dear J-

The boy keeps trying to worm his way back in. Doesn’t work that way, buddy. Nice try.

Mike