Blood Removal
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© jonathan saunders
The day I met Helen.
I was about to leave in frustration with myself over many different reasons when someone from college I hadn’t seen since saw me and said hello. He was making images too and when I imagined the kind of images he was making, I suppose it bothered me enough to just start making my own.
I shot 19 rolls of film in less then an hour and only stopped as I had run out of film. Konica 640 Tungsten chrome film shot in daylight unfiltered that expired years before I got it mailed to me out of Neil Selkirk’s trash. It sat unprocessed a few years after I used it too.
No one spoke to me and I didn’t speak to anyone. Well, there was one person I remember speaking to me. She had emerald green eyes, soft blond hair pulled straight back, porcelain white skin and a chest that was exploding out of her corset, her emerald green corset that matched her eyes in sparkle and was tight… yes, that tight.
I cannot remember what she said to me, but I know she said it soft and while smiling. She was everything I wanted in this moment… I looked down at my camera away from her happy gaze, turned around and without saying a word to her, walked back off into the crowd.
NY | My Favorite Towel In My Bathroom
FL | A Petal On The Hood Of A Car
I immediately decided I would not join.
Then I got an email for a Fun Shoot open to the public this one day for $60.
I immediately decided I would go.
This was the 31st club I have visited for sporting clays.
As she turned towards the group and stepped off the curb, I made an image similar to this one about the same time I noticed a large white van with flashing lights coming right at us… then I heard it’s siren. It was not going to stop and it was not going to avoid us. My left arm was free and the closest to her. I grabbed her bag strap and pulled her out of the way, close enough that my arm then went around her waist and I didn’t stop pulling her out of that white van’s way till we were almost back up on the curb.
I’ve done similar things before at awkward streetlights and always, always, always overreacted, once so bad I never lived it down.
This time, this night, I did not overreact.
The sound of these types of jets is distinct and somehow it brings me great comfort every time I hear them fly around up there in the sky above me. It has for 20 years.
I have never finished a single hard alcoholic beverage.
I have had less then maybe thirty beers my entire life, never more then two at a time.
I have never tried a single illegal drug.
I never take medicine unless it is prescribed.
The last time I was prescribed medicine I didn’t finish over half the dosage.
I was recently given a new prescription for these little yellow tablets, one a day, for a year, as my one bad habit (see here), is proving to be slowly killing me just like any of the above would, most likely even faster.
I’ve had the above little yellow tablets a week now, I have yet to take a single pill.
Chemicals as chemicals somehow bother me yet chemicals disguised as plain hamburgers, cupcakes or pasta somehow I choose to celebrate.
Thank you.
Yesterday at 12:17PM Central time, my brain starting screaming. This morning at 6:29AM Central time somewhere up high over somewhere else, it became so loud that the little boy behind me on my flight in seat 11C must of reached the limit of listening to that deafeningly silent screaming inside my head as he started letting his actual screaming out from the seat right behind me in 10C. For almost the entire 45 minute flight, flying away from something I did not want to leave, he was actually able to let his real screaming all out until a unique, previously unknown, beautiful woman disguised as a stewardess brought him momentary comfort while right at the end of his rope… I would of just chosen a different word to be screaming.
Thank you little screaming boy. Thank you unique, previously unknown, beautiful woman.
Forrest M | 1993 | by Me