what if for the first 25 years of your life you were blind. lets say you were born blind, grew up that way, were accustomed to not being able to see anything but complete darkness and maybe some blurry shades of light here and there. lets also say that you got married. and your relationship with your significant other was built on personality alone. what sensual, erotic things would you experience with your lover? your knowledge of that person would be on touch, taste, smell, hearing alone. you would never had ever seen them. you would have felt their face, but you would never know color their eyes or hair was.
now, lets say that one day you go into surgery and have new eyes put in. now you can see for the first time. you are for the first time in your life being given a new sense with which to judge how you feel about different aspects of your life. do you think that your perspective on that person might change after seeing them for the first time? or would that be completely shallow and superficial. most people would probably say yes, of course, that would be shallow and superficial. but what if, you see the person for the first time ever that you've spent the last 20 years with, and they are so god awful ugly that you cannot stand to look at them one minute longer? what would you do?

first, go download this track called "Nel Cimitero Di Tucson" at stereogum. it's the song sampled by gnarls on crazy and it's from a 60s italian spaghetti western. as you listen, you can taste the dust in the air and furrow your brow in the glare of the pitiless sun. enjoy.

so i'm back. been back for a while but waiting to post until i'd processed all the images from yosemite. well that hasn't happened yet, so here's a stopgap, a section of journal written at the end of the second day. i will flickr most of the photos and link them in the future. until then…

some thoughts about the trip so far…

sleep deprivation kept me on the verge of falling asleep during the entire ~4 hour drive to yosemite. reid talks and drives too fast. i wonder if i ever fell asleep completely. once he thought i had drifted off and he just stopped talking mid-sentence. guess my sunglasses and stillness had him fooled. i really forced myself to stay awake, although i should have just told him i needed to crash for a couple hours.

had a headache that morning around 7am. i'm guessing no sleep + caffeine, nicotine and alcohol suplexed my brain. there was a point when the sun was just starting to rise at which the center of my vision dropped out, as if my blindspot had grown to the size of a golfball hovering 6 inches in front of my skull. constant fixed vision focused on a screen 18 inches from my face can't possibly be healthy.

reid bent my usb stick when he flipped over the laptop it was plugged into. he immediately apologized and offered to replace it if it was broken. of course i assured him that it would be fine, like i always do, even though i was annoyed. it still works and i bent it back to fairly straight. later at night i showed him my ds lite and let him play it not realizing that his hands were grubby from chasing after a mouse in the fireplace. sigh. more annoyance. but i suppose the pristine white finish wasn't going to last long anyway.

i'm actually starting to appreciate reid a lot more. we had dinner at a pizza place up the road. a pitcher of beer later and our conversation felt a lot less forced. i respect his ambition and his work ethic.

the place we're staying in is called the "hunter's house". it's about 30 minutes outside of the valley on the merced river. just down the road from the yosemite view lodge where we stayed last time. the house is huge. at the top of a hill and overlooking the river. the back yard descends into a valley with another fork of the river. i'll take a few pictures tomorrow.

jo and ben arrived late tonight. this is the first time i've met them in person. good first impression. should be fun to work with them.