New Roll | The Spectacle Has Gotta Tap The Brakes (Patreon)

Hello! This is Kodak Gold 200 shot through my Fujica GW690i. The roll is here on Flickr and here as a zipped folder on Drive.

This roll was half test shots for 36 Views, but taken on much less expensive/hard-to-procure film to get an idea of whether I actually liked them. I will probably, for example, take this shot on slide film and make it part of the series - I kind of love it. The way the light and dark build into a composition that leads the eye straight to the mountain—despite it being such a "minor" part of the scene—is exactly the kind of image I want in this series.

Although it was cloudy, I scouted a few locations where I knew roughly where the mountain should be, to see if the spacing of the shot would work for me. In this one, the mountain would be to the left of the flag...

...in this one it would be down the middle of the shed and the lighthouse. (I think I prefer this one, tbh.)

The rest of the roll was for fun. From here on out: my thoughts on The Events.

I had an unbelievably hard week last week because I'm easily triggered lately, in the classical PTSD sense. Relatively minor events have sent me into episodes where I do not leave bed for several days.

I think it's the ambient stress and the speed of the Spectacle (the Debord one, which I read in my early 20s and permanently rewired my brain) that is degrading my ability to function. Like, during the Bush era (which I was a child for!), it took years to manufacture the pro-war consensus for the invasion of Iraq. While it was obviously evil to invade and widely opposed despite the constructed reality, they still at least went to the trouble of constructing the reality before the war began.

I think it's kind of wild when you watch consent get built for a war literally overnight, as we just saw. On Friday, suddenly we'd bombed Iran; Saturday, the NYT proclaimed the level-headed justification for the military intervention most people didn't want.

The heavy-handed post-truth depiction of authoritarian society via Orwell's 1984, where "we have always been at war with Eurasia" is an immediately-accepted truth as soon as it is introduced into the public consciousness, is actually how mass media appears to be functioning. It erodes at your sanity to watch the needle be yanked to-and-fro on a literally daily basis.

For those of us caught in the crossfire of American policy, overnight, our future lives shift drastically—will friends and family be deployed? will there be no more national forests? will Medicaid functionally disappear?—and there is no apparent reason for toying with all of our futures and our lives beyond "Trump wills it, so it is." There isn't even the veneer of realpolitik justification for any of it; Kissinger must have taken it with him when he died.

I am reading as much philosophy and theory as I can to try and understand what is happening on a large scale. I am following the news to try and keep up with the forces that largely guide my life. It isn't a matter of understanding, though; it's simply that I can't keep up anymore.

As a trans woman, I'm used to being fucked with by my government, but this year's breakneck speed has outstripped even my ability to keep up with an ever-more-hostile world and bleaker future. And so with seemingly no logic to our ruling leaders' actions and increasingly bleaker futures to comprehend every single day, I think for me I find it easier to simply shut down. The speed and destructive force of this year is too much to think about for me, in a genuine sense. It makes me feel like my entire life is pointless.

I mostly broke out of it this week by doing a tiny bit of an edible (I am a huge lightweight) and riding a Washington State Ferry with my loved ones. I have to find something to focus on, on a smaller scale. I don't know what that is yet (I have still not had any luck getting a relatively easy job to fill some of my time), but I'll start with the ferry rides, and pretending my thoughts in these posts are enough.

Hope you're all holding up okay.

Vicki <3