Dear J-
Every so often I go through and clean out the camera that usually sits in the bottom of my purse satchel. I’ve been carrying it around for at least three years now and I’ve managed to take only a handful of pictures with it, really; the same thing happened with the Olympus 35RC I carried around in my old backpack; I managed to run maybe one or two rolls of film through before I got sidetracked into a video game habit. I tend to overcollect; there are games on the shelf that haven’t been collected, just as there are cameras and lenses which haven’t imaged scenes for years now (I’m looking at you, Nikkor-NC 35/1.4).
I suppose I feel a need to prepare for the unexpected, no matter how unlikely. I spent the last couple of weeks mulling over various portable photographic options, convinced that I had enough room to throw together a flat-topped SLR, like a Pen or GF1 hasn’t got my name on it in the eventual future. Throughout elementary school I saved bandage tins (when they came in tins) and armed with a basic knowledge and my usual pack-rat habits, would squirrel away random bits of aluminum foil, matchbooks, stale candy, and analgesics as a survival kit. After all, you never knew when it would come in handy, and wouldn’t that be a feather in my cap, to have that on hand?
The mind tends to invent the need for things you don’t need; I’ve been throwing around different lenses in my head because of a perceived need for missing focal lengths, for instance, or that I may run out of things to watch or play. When it comes down to it I can’t predict the future, and I sure can’t ensure that I’ll always have the right tool or survival kit at hand. Right now it’s not hard to drive those feelings down by asking the easy question of how often I’m actually going to use it, but I can’t count on it forever; the paean to materialism isn’t the most uplifting message, but understanding it is half the battle, really.
Mike
Dear J- 
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