A flickr of an obsession

You know what I saw when I logged into my Blogger account? That this week's post - the one you're reading right now - is my 100th blog post! Now honestly I'm not really that excited, but inwardly I'm just mulling that number over while my fingers - stiff from the slightly-cool early September wind - become more limber and accepting of the keyboard.

But just as a year doesn't feel like a year anymore, and a hundred dollars in your pocket means you're set for a month - maybe more than that if you're pinching the pennies, I guess writing my 100th blog post doesn't seem like that much of a landmark. Now on the other hand if I were writing my 100th novel, then I think that would be something worth getting excited over, but not with my blog. Not that I don't value it of course, but I know that I view my novellas and my blog posts differently.

It feels like I'm rambling, so why don't I get to the point. If any of you are familiar with the site, maybe you'll pick up on my intentional spelling error in the title. You see, there's a site called flickr.com where users can share their photos and comment on and favorite them. Most of the photographs I've seen were taken by professionals - you can distinguish on your account if you're a professional photographer - but yet a lot of them are just amature photographers like me, who wish to share their photos with the world.

So what exactly am I obsessed with when it comes to Flickr you ask? Well, just like in music and food, there are certain types you tend to stick with, and I'm not one of those people who feels inclined to stray out of my "favorites-rut" and discover something new. Which is a long way of saying that just like with Google Maps I look at...old/abandoned house pictures! Yes folks, I'm just a barrel of eclectic tastes! I'm all over the map! No pun intended!

But then again, it doesn't really bother me that I don't have varied tastes in things - to use the word "things" as a flimsy substitute for my interests - because when it comes to the things I'm interested in, I know I have a deep-seated passion for them, and don't consider it a waste of time if I sit at my computer for an hour when I'm supposed to be getting to bed and flipping through picture after picture of abandoned houses and farms. And this is where my "mega-curiosity streak" comes in.

My mega-curiosity streak is what sometimes leads me to finding that tantalizing abandoned house hiding alongside the crumbling, silent lip of a narrow country road, it's what causes me to cruise down the streets of some small town in Google Maps - mostly in the U.P, eh! - searching for a dilapidated house, or just wondering what's down this road? Where does this corner open up to? It's also the same curiosity that has lead me to some of my favorite artists, or where I've found myself watching the music video for the latest pop song because I was wondering what it was like. Which, let me tell you, I'll be doing less often! Some of those videos are quite interesting...to use that word loosely because I don't want to waste time talking about the latest pop sensation. My mouth is filling with a bitter taste already.

And also I want to steer away from those subjects because I have a tendency to get cynical and sarcastic. But apparently I didn't get away from the subject fast enough because somewhere deep in the traitor part of my brain Katy Perry's "E.T" is playing. Speaking of weird, right? I mean, any song that has Kanye West in it - shudder - has got to be unnerving. The guy's a creep.

You know what I think would be fun? Some day, when I decide to let the part of me sitting down at my computer right now to just dissolve away and let Side B of me settle into the comfy dorm computer chair and just start plucking random keys like a bored cat pressing piano keys, a discontorted song rising up from its fluffy paws, I would love to just unload all the sarcasm, frustration, confusion and sometimes slight anger and disgust I have towards music of the pop, country and modern rock genres. I mean, I'm sure we all have it, for different reasons, but I think I've always practiced restraint, both in my writing and my lift. Well, part of it comes from the fact that I honestly don't know how to translate the sarcasm that flows so easily in my novellas...into my actual everyday life. Because essentially that sarcasm is more so on my Side B, rather than my Side A. And as I'm understanding both now - and probably a while ago too - Side B of me is almost translated entirely in my novellas, and funneled through the characters I create. Which brings me to a favorite quote of mine spoken by Ann Tyler - I'm assuming she's a writer of some sort? I'm not sure, can't remember anymore - which is: "I write because I want to have more than one life". And that's why I write! So I can release Side B of me. I can blare it over the crackling speakers of some old, faded-red, convertible Mustang while I wind down country roads, the tires hugging the crumbling shoulders like spindly winter trees wrapping around the weather-beaten sides of an abandoned house, providing both a steady shoulder yet a close reminder of death, a constant, tightening touch.

And even though all of the characters I create inevitably have their problems - most of them in the past, since I seem to focus on each character's past - I still find freedom in their lives, as if just as I give them life, they give me life in return. It's as if they're saying they can live without me giving them words to pages, but their life becomes so much more when I do. Which could lead me back to my blog post about "picking up hitchikers". Each character comes to me as a whole jigsaw puzzle, it's just that only a dozen or so pieces will have pictures on them, and even then they might be faded while the rest of the pieces are blank, staring up at me like an umarred piece of paper, awaiting the pen to summon the words that are hiding within.

Well, I certainly haven't talked about flickr.com much have I? I believe not that long ago - in fact, sometime this summer - I created an account with Flickr, for the sole purpose of favoriting my favorite abandoned house pictures, and as o fright now I think I'm at more than two-hundred. Some users will have literally hundreds and I'll just keep clicking through their photostream, enticed and excited by the small thumbnails of the photos and I can't resist clicking on them to make them bigger. More of the curiosity thing, remember? Also, by way of Flickr I've also discovered some amazingly interesting abandoned towns, most of them in sparse states like Kansas and North Dakota.

The more photos I favorite and enjoy - secretely, slightly jealous of all the photographers who capture such amazing shots of beautifully dilapidated houses - I can't help thinking how much I would love to be a traveling photographer and capture such beauties for myself. Getting paid to roam America's crumbling backroads like the decomposing spine of some once-loyal and well-feared guard dog within the dusty remains of a city dump or regal dairy farm that now only has his legends, his hilariously infalted tales told by wide-eyed children to let others know that he was once much more than what he is now. Some may find such exploits lonely or disturbing if they were to deliberately seek out such crumbling facades and sightless windows wide shut, like visiting an abandoned, overgrown cemetery to chat with the centuries old bones, keeping company the remains of a great-great grandparent you never knew.

But I wouldn't see it that way. There's a certain, ambigous flame that ignites within me whenever I spot an abandoned house. It's something I haven't fully been able to grasp, and perhaps I don't want to. For in the same way it's like that curiosity that drives me to new and far-flung places, I can't quite desribe what draws me towards one lazily curving country road and not another, or why I am inexplicably drawn to the sodden-faced, embarassingly-outdated old houses of Calumet and Ishpeming, Michigan and not the newly restored old houses that stand in regal comparison. But what I do know is that with each of these things I have a flickr of an obsession...which can ignite so much more than just a meager flame, for while my obsessions are pale flames stuttering in the wind, my passions that arise from said flames are fires rolling through layers of parched forests, gasping on the dry wood succumbing to ashes within their zealous grasp.