one of my favorite pictures of all time; I'm not sure who took it. I believe that I took it from google images at one point and made pop-art out of it. it is of the sutliff bridge, that washed away back in 2008 or so, that was a lonely old rickety bridge that i'd walk across with my daughter on sunday mornings. now it could be that sutliff, a town with only two streets (swine drive and madison avenue) was actually a lively town, as it had one bar i believe, and was way out in the middle of nowhere on the cedar river. but on sunday mornings, it was generally very quiet. my daughter, who was about two or three in these days (we're talking early eighties) would want to get out of the car and walk the bridge, and we often did. we'd peer between the wood slats on the bridge and the river would often be rushing quite quickly below. i was a little afraid, frankly, afraid that the wood wouldn't hold up, or that she'd figure out some way to get over the rails on the sides. or that, once at one side or the other, we'd slip down the riverbanks. but it never happened; we'd throw little pebbles for a while, then we'd continue the twenty-mile (or so) drive down to iowa city.

a year or so ago there was a photo-storage crash and i lost virtually everything i'd stored for showing; the site, fotopic, disappeared in thin air with no warning. slowly i started putting things on imageshack, which appears to be more stable, a better place for having them since, for the web, you don't really need them to be perfect. flickr is the one for the large-bundle photos, but flickr only allows a certain amount before you have to pay. like i say, slowly i've been putting pictures back on imageshack; that's how i ran into this one. it may be a slow process. my mission is to restore, first, a page on my father's photography, a page on my own, some pop art, a page for some of my calendar photos. i'm not sure exactly how this will work. i'm deliberating. many of the photos ended up somewhat randomly, taken from my computer and put in a dropbox folder. this at least means i have access to some of the old photos. as i get them on imageshack, i'll show. a kind of pop art retrospective. i'm really proud of some of the stuff i did for siuc; i'm not sure how much of it still lives back in the old blogs; the system remains, even if everything else is just a memory. as i let go of that, the old cesl system, it remains for me to gather up, and put in my own places, that which was valuable to me. an siuc retrospective, which might include the train-man stuff of carbondale, might also be nice. collecting and presenting my memories is what i'm talking here.

pictures like the above really present a kind of problem, because, on the one hand, i'm attached to them, they mean something to me, i've invested a bit into the memory. on the other hand, it's not mine; and, the bridge itself is gone; there's no way to go get the same picture myself. so i found the site on google images, and, it's from 2008; the author doesn't even list who actually took it. maybe i should forget it, consider it one of those things that i can't do anything about. this also, i'm mulling over.

a facebook friend is young, and has traveled maybe seventy countries; he's really racking them up. so he was about to go to bangladesh, and he said to his friends, what should i do, where should i go? naturally his friends came up with kind of party-side suggestions. he was only going to be there for a day or two, before he went off to bhutan, another notch on his stick. but he wakes up in the morning and writes in to facebook: help! there's an elephant right outside my window! the friends, needless to say, had mixed reactions.

it's cold in lubbock, cold and clear, no sign of an impending hurricane in these parts. we all await the election and whatever happens on the east coast. actually, for such a large city, it's somewhat overboard on the halloween-decoration thing, and i'm not sure that late shoppers like us will even find costumes, let alone pumpkins, or those things we should have pulled in a month or so ago but, in our own frazzled way, have been unable to do up until now. towns like this are pulling out the thanksgiving and christmas decoration, and you have to load up now, because if you don't, you're just out of luck.

and so we go hurtling into the great holiday season. halloween, saints day, souls day, day of the dead, sadie hawkins, election day, you name it, they're all in a row, and they're coming right up. the best weather in the year, no matter where you live. and i'm grateful; i've made it to another one.