The Wrestler

The credits to The Wrestler are just wrapping up as I begin to write this. Wow, what a sad fucking movie. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed watching it immensely and will no doubt give it a second viewing in the very near future, but I just can't shake this empty feeling I got from watching it. When Mickey Rourke tells Marisa Tomei at the end of the movie, "Out there is the only place I can get hurt" ( in reference to the real world vs. being on stage and wrestling), I just felt my heart slowly sink.

That, combined with the weather this morning, an unpleasant week of work (halfway over), and the burdens of house hunting have left me in an odd and dark mood. Maybe I should just take a nap...

Here are some old photos I tooled around on while I was watching The Wrestler.

Happiness is...

In May, I went on vacation to Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina with some old friends from High School. Organised and hosted by one Chelsea Sally Place, the trip was a roaring success. I got to spend plenty of time catching up with some of my favorite people, a lot of whom, I hadn't seen in two or more years.



Silly drunk (2 kegs a day), silly high (4 lbs. of weed butter), and silly burnt (2 tubes of sunscreen for 17 people), the whole goddam trip was one big, wonderful, mess. The house we were staying in was a dream- 30 yards or so from the beach with an unobstructed view, a roof deck larger than my bedroom, a 2nd story deck that wrapped around the entire beachside face, a volleyball net, sea kayaks, california king-sized beds, a hammock, and most important of all, a fully-equipped ninja blaster (an indispensable device created by the Japanese to help drunk Americans float safely in open seas).

I meant to take more pictures while I was down there, but I ended up focusing my energies elsewhere...

"How did those footprints get on the ceiling?"

-Chelsea's mom, Bev, after visiting the house following our departure.

Picture of a Wine Glass

This is a throwback from when I was living by myself in Portland, OR. To get the shot, I placed the glass on top of a glass table and then positioned a flashlight underneath, shining directly up.

Afterwards, I tweaked it up a little bit in photoshop to give it a unique look and then flipped it upside down.

I took this photo a couple of months ago in my basement, which is one of the scariest places I've ever been. It seriously looks like awful, unspeakable things have happened here in the past. Not only does it look like the backdrop to a snuff film, but the entire floor of the entire basement is coated in human feces.

You see, a few months back, the roommates and I experienced a few weeks where none of us had any money whatsoever. We were behind in our bills by several months and were basically living like rats. When the house stock of toilet paper ran out, we collectively began using whatever we could find as substitutes. Let me assure you, THIS IS NOT A GOOD IDEA. Two weeks later, the sewage pipes in our basement exploded and filled our basement with a foot and a half of shit water. Long story short, after a lot of phonecalls and blatant lying to our landlord, a plumber and a cleanup crew arrived on the scene to save the day. Sort of. The cleaners did an incredibly lackluster job and to this day, there are still remnants of half-degraded toilet paper and dried poo-sludge sporadically adorning the unfinished floor of our bio-hazardous basement.

That said,

My roommate Mike loves partaking in photo shoots and one night while we were both more-than-a-little drunk, we decided to utilize our grimy shit dungeon to try and create something that could be used for the cover of a horror movie.

The only light we used for the shot is coming from a little 60 w ceiling light, right behind Mike's head. We also tried the shot with a 9 inch hunting knife, but I think the baseball bat worked best.

After I took the shot, I threw it into Photoshop and added some blending layers, did a little dodging and burning, and tweaked the colors a little until I came to the final result.

like a virgin...

Here it is, my very own blog! We'll see how this turns out, but I decided to start this so I could have somewhere a little more personalized then facebook or myspace to post my pictures and rant about shit that probably only matters to me.

I hope you enjoy it!