Palemale near the 76th Street & Fifth Avenue Playground - September 10, 2009.
Since Monday I have been posting old images taken from last Sunday and earlier, because work is so busy I was not able to get to Central Park to get any new shots.
I can't avoid believing that I'm slacking, and I do get quite unsettled when I do not see my friends for so long. I feel a certain amount of pressure--the good kind of pressure, when I read the statistics for palemale.com and realize that several thousand visitors attempt to see something new each day.
I sometimes feel ashamed on those days that I am only able to put a few images up without any sort of theme, coherency or even consistent captions. Then I run off to bed with an orange and white appendage at my ankle, thinking that my days offering is not worthy of the many people who are going to take a moment of their day to visit the site.
Until I can get to those handsome little faces which I am presently imagining are all sleeping in their cozy little places in holes and trees and burrows, I would like to offer a small piece of advice in lieu of new photographs. This advice is very small and quite commonly mentioned so it is not anything unique.
The advice: Please try switching off your television for the next two weeks and see if you can hear the beautiful silence which that power button makes. If not two weeks perhaps just one day. I did say it was common advice--common indeed, though so difficult to accomplish. I live daily with a great deal of guilt that I am part of the cruel distribution of ‘News’ to the world. News that so many people believe that they cannot live without, but it is this very News that is intended to get you sick and addicted.
Maybe part of the reason I can bear the strain of going out as much as I do to photograph as many beautiful things as I can is because I feel the guilt of being a part of the distributing of Television News to unsuspecting viewers like you.
The reason for my advice is unnecessary for now, and will nevertheless take too much time to lay out.
As I look at recent statistics from my web host Yahoo! I see that on average there are about 7 to 20 thousand hits per day so I will assume that there are a good many people who are probably going to read this. With this volume in mind, I will set my expectations at a practical level and anticipate that at least one person will take my advice.
It will be nice to hear from that one person if indeed a beautiful change was observed when that humble TV switch goes off and that dreadful, clawing concoction of light and sound is hushed to allow the beautiful silence to come out from where it was suffocating from the poisonous manipulating noises generated by those infernal television sets.
Hopefully one single person will be able to accomplish this difficult feat. If in your attempt you find yourself suddenly nervous and jittery from being suddenly separated from the silencing of this conniving device I can offer you to try what helped me through those first few anxious days when I pulled the plug on my set back in 1993; it was the re-reading of Great Expectations--a dog-eared paper-backed copy which I had packed and brought with me all the way from Trinidad three years before. I pulled it out from a cardboard box from my closet and made more than a dozen attempts to get through the first few paragraphs. The words were bitter to my frazzled mind having been bombarded by the many distractions I indulged in on moving to New York from my humble Caribbean island home.
I was determined however to replace my insatiable desire for cheap entertainment with reading; that dreadful, boring pastime which had been preached to me forever as a means of improving my mind. So I had convinced myself to make a good wholesome effort in this direction.
And so it was Great Expectations, a book which had annoyed me throughout my school days, which presently engaged my mind, for I somehow knew it had a superb story which I began to read from those yellowed pages with flaking edges. Before I had completely fallen asleep that night I had managed to be absorbed by the story and I was well into the second paragraph of Chapter one, without feeling compelled to start all over.
Thank you Philip Pirrip.
View from Roosevelt Island - January 10, 2010.
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