This Thursday I went to an informal meetup to talk about photographs. (If that sounds atypical of me, it was and I can't explain it.) I brought this and two others. I didn't know what to expect.

When I arrived, everyone else was a man at least fifteen years older than me. It was not a bad experience, although I often felt lost and mute in the face of so much talk about lenses and Lightroom. I've never discussed pictures in real life, by which I mean not the internet--not to imply that I've done much here. It makes me realize how alone I have been in this conversation, or maybe better expressed: that incessant questioning does not a conversation make. Other people are a question mark bigger than any of my own and/or any question I ask of myself is a statement in disguise.


I want to have more encounters with the really unknown. Not the call-and-response of my own thoughts, more than a reactive awareness still centered in my own experience. I want to be seeing and not feeling. Feeling and not thinking? This is a nebulous idea that's slipping away now I'm trying to pin it down. What makes a place I've never been more unknown than a day I've never been through? Is thinking of something as familiar the problem? Familiarity itself isn't. Is there a problem? Maybe I just want to be surprised.