Catalogue

I catalog images. I'm a collector. I guess you could say it's some kind of hobby for me. 

But there is one thing that sets me apart from your average hobbyist — the kind of people who play with trains well into their 40s or 50s and spend their kids' college funds on Datsun parts — and that is the simple fact that I have never gained any sort of pleasure from it. 

No, none, no pleasure. I haven't felt anything from it. It isn't even good enough to give me that kind of vacantly rewarding feeling that you get from completing some menial, but not fully uninteresting, task. It isn't even the kind of thing that you get this kind of weird, submissive effect from (that whole "timewaster" phenomenon). 

In fact, I'd even go so far as to call this a __chore__. Because no longer am I interested in the pictures I collect. They don't have any interesting nature. Most of them are pictures of motel rooms or pictures of strip malls taken by the local news in that jurisdiction. I don't care about these pictures. Nobody does. They aren't primal, they aren't visceral, they don't fill me with some kind of inane lust. They are empty. And, interestingly enough, so is their only collector... 

I have reached an epoch in my own life where I can no longer be subject to the liminally negative effects of having a poor headspace, nor am I at all bothered by ills of a physical nature. I would discuss social ills, but they are not relevant at all to my current living situation. I cannot go into any length to explain that, but stay with me, I promise, there's a light at the end of the tunnel (to some degree). 

I want to be honest and open with my family, my friends, my former coworkers. I don't really see any problem with what I do. Using 'like' would be the wrong word for this kind of passive acceptance of these items ... I sometimes imagine the situations of these pictures' cascades; cascades, of course, meaning the reasons that they came to me in the first place. Because, really, it is not my ticket to go where I am not invited. I am not the kind of person to do that, you know... 

But enough about me, more about the images. I have to show whoever's reading this an example of what I mean by "passive acceptance". I sometimes see a picture... let's take, for instance, this picture I have here (shown below) of what I'm fairly sure (as of last categorization period) is the Warwick Mall in Warwick, Rhode Island.

I envisioned myself in the scenario not as an employee, not as a civilian, not even as an emergency responder. I envisioned myself in this picture as some kind of ethereal contextual entity. Not some kind of physical, tangible one that could be interacted with. There is no flesh on the bones of my spirit, so they say. But I could see this picture and think about it in a way that provided for some kind of entertainment... although it still failed to arouse pleasure in me, it still failed to give me the release I've been looking for for 20 years.

It didn't actually provide anything to me. I was never provided with anything in my life, mentally. In high school, I was an observer. In my years of vacuous employment, I was again just an observer -- a pointlessly organized bystander sent there from paths of yore to discover the realms unknown. In my mid 20's, I worked my last job, and that was again a 'bystander' situation for me.

For my last job, I worked as a Psychiatric Examiner for San Bernardino County's sheriff. My badge number... you don't know my badge number. I was working there for such a long time that this badge number, this inseparable proof of my identity, began to fade into the mist of all that I habituated, all that became evidence of my nightmarish scheme of creation and sufficiency. I began to see my badge number in license plates. In image filenames. In the numbers located so neatly on the forms of official identification we accepted in our years as psych ward employees. I began to see it in addresses. The shortest number... the shortest numbers, the ones I used to love when I was little. I used to see them everywhere... I still do. I have a hard time isolating the number from everything that happened and continues to happen to me.

The work I did is about as important as the EXIF data of every picture I collect (EXIF data being the metadata system that allows for current methods of organization of images, of course), that is to say, it's not even worth mentioning. I can't keep what I did then separate from what I do now, but that doesn't mean much. The work I do in my spare time as a matured adult is much less alive, much less creative than what I did back then.

One of the pictures fascinated me deeply, but I've lost it, I'm afraid, and I can't get it back. I don't even remember the specifics... my memory is rather shot at this age and it's hard for me to recall things that weren't burnt into my memory. It was a picture of a hotel, with a family standing in the middle. An average, white family. Checking into a motel in Bloomington, Indiana. I stared at this picture for so long. I paid attention to the material of the couch in the room; they had opted to pay for a special room, some kind of suite. I can almost taste the linens, fresh linens no doubt, placed on the top of their bed. I became involved in this image. Over time, I began to see myself in this picture.

This picture began to resonate with me in such a way that I will never experience at any other point in my life. I would say, verifiably, it is the only time that I have had any kind of emotional connection to something concrete and tangible, people included. I remember the look on their faces -- it was so HD that you could almost see their pores, you could see the acne on their teenage son's face and you could almost sniff the room, you could almost begin to imagine yourself in their place in such a way that no picture since then has ever replicated.

I began to feel like this was the part of this human experience that I lacked fundamentally. Over the years, I began to see this picture as some kind of documentary of the childhood I missed out on. The childhood where we went on a road trip to some small town because it had a Confederate statue or something. The childhood where field trips had meaning and there was some kind of concrete idea of 'friendship' or familial care that went beyond the absent-minded way my family treated us with the kind of ghostly irrelevance that never seemed to strike any chord with us other than some kind of melodramatic apathy.

And again, with anything I ritualize to this extent, I see myself in the picture over some period of time. It began to stretch on until I could see characters in the image moving -- not just the family, not just me, but the characters on the little placards that showed you the hotel's phone guide, or their free breakfast menu, or their WiFi password (although this was back when hotel WiFi was more often than not a paid excursion and a reflection of some odd lap of luxury). I could have a resonant, haptic interaction with this picture. I could over time destroy and create in this image as I wished. The contents of the picture never changed in a concrete way... but I could feel that there was something missing, or that there was something created.

In some way, it became a concrete way for me to play with the ideas I don't really get to experience because of the environment I'm in now... a real dump composed of only the most amoral substance, probably leaking with the kind of virile asbestotic plague that seems to hide in the remnants of cultural flight. As the building I'm in began to close its doors on me (in ways both literal and figurative), I found ways to entertain myself with this picture, and the sentience of my own living space became less human than I myself ever was. I felt I had some power, some actual power, and I felt less and less like a bystander. I kept wondering, I really did, about the family in the picture; where they came from, for real, not some kind of imaginary conception of their backstory, some kind of tactile description of their upbringing, their experiences, what brought them here. I wondered if there was lingerie in the wife's bag... I began to have an almost sexual connection to this picture, and it provided release to me in a way I couldn't describe. It was the first image I could create and destroy in with unparalleled freedom. I finally found a home in which I was not a prisoner, not a slave, not a liminal subject. When I had this picture, I had life.

One day I turned on my computer, and it was gone forever.