Obiter Dictum

I had set a task for myself to write a short-story to enter in the Writer’s Digest Your Story competition for October.

As anyone who knows me might imagine, I have put it off over and over again. I keep listing for myself the manifold reasons that I could not possibly win. I regularly remind me of the potential embarrassment that could result from making my writing public. And on and on and on.

This morning, though, I decided that none of those excuses or lines of reasoning matter much. There is nothing, really, preventing me from submitting, other than fear. And fear means Mr. Ego is back in the driver’s seat, doesn’t it? It isn’t like submitting a story is life threatening, after all.

So, type away, I did. Submit, I have. We shall see how it goes. Perhaps in a month’s time I can add “published author” to my list of accomplishments. If not, I think I’ll just try it again.

A couple of months ago, I found myself sucked in to the world of high dynamic range (HDR) photography. HDR is a melding of photographic technique with certain post-processing, er, processes. The general notion is to take several captures of the same image, but at varying exposures. It is easiest to fix the aperture and vary the shutter speed, thereby eliminating any focus issues, which would be nearly impossible to deal with later (although, I am toying with the idea of doing it the other way around just for grins).

The resulting images can be anything from normal-looking, where the processing is not apparent, to surreal and impressionistic. I tend to go in for something in between the extremes. One of my images is below. You can click on the picture to see my small HDR gallery:

Watering Tower, 2009

It is 5:29a, Saturday, October 03, 2009 and I am sitting in my favorite chair. I look through the window and there is nothing. No light. Blackness. It is still. My right foot is somewhat cold.

I have been sitting here for one hour and eighteen minutes. I am not my ego, I have realized. I am the medium on which my ego exists. I am the stage on which the ego acts out (ha) its dramas. I understand, but that makes the ego kick into high gear. “You do not understand.” The resistance tells me that I do.

The ego fears. The ego is angry. It induces physical response to the fears it generates and then feeds on the resulting cascade of chemical reactions. The ego is Pavlov and Pavlov’s dog, rolled in to one. It wants to induce a reaction because the reaction induces the need to induce a reaction. Without induction of, or reaction to, there is no ego. It fears this.

It is dark. The ego pretends to imagine itself as one with everything. I laugh. There is no orchestral soundtrack, building to crescendo as realization dawns. Silence. The head tilts slightly to the right. A single light in the distance winks into life. Ego tells me this is real, not the emptiness.

I am the light the ego has summoned. I hang in the black cold, unwavering, wan, weak for now. I am a pinprick of golden light on the black velvet curtain that fronts the stage. I tell the ego to tilt the head a little more this way. The light brightens and ego retreats.

The body relaxes. It is dark outside the window again. It is 5:45a, Saturday, October 03, 2009 and I am sitting in my favorite chair. I am still. And, still I am.