« Walking in - 7/26/12 | Main | Walking In - 8/1/12 »
August 26, 2012
Walking In - 07/31/12
At the corner of California and Sansome
Shivering as the sun boils off the morning's fog jacket
Headphones, cameras, iPhone
I'm wearing all these electronics, in tune with the mob,
but somehow isolated and alone all at once
The herd spills into the crosswalk and I don't even look at the lights any more
I've truly become just another bait-fish in the school
Just go with the flow
We push across California
Cable Car cables popping and grinding beneath the city streets
I want to lay down on the road and fall asleep dreaming to the sound
A chef pushes a food cart through the street, bouncing it roughly across the tracks
No one bats an eye
What madness this city conceals.
As if, somehow this is all normal, unremarkable.
Somehow they tune it all out like white noise.
Every person I pass is from a country I've never seen
Everyone staring into their iPhone
Every surface covered with cryptic stickers and graffiti pencils
Panhandlers with dogs on concrete beds
2 grown men in the little yellow tricycles they rent on Fisherman's Wharf
They're tearing up the street in front of my office again
Insanity
Walking home
The corner flower guy splashes the water from his buckets into Sansome Street
Office rats stalk home, falling over homeless street urchins and bikes chained to parking meters
Broken people push baby carriages of trash through the streets before them gently rocking the prams as they go
As if they're rocking their precious trash to sleep
Sing me a garbage lullaby
I stop at the street corner because I have no home
No place to be
No one is waiting on me
No one expects me
Only I float back and forth across the country like bull horn kelp on the tides
They tightened the cables on the California Street Cable Car
I can hear that it's not slapping about like it used to
Now only a buzzing noise as it slides by
Ficus trees and hobbled pigeons and kids wait for the buses with a single parent
Those stupid tourists in double-decker buses gawking at my living room
Have they no manners?
This isn't a theme park for Christ's sake
I run into another photographer
He's a street photographer but shooting models now
Always they ask me what I shoot?
But I never know what to say.
Only I shoot what I see. Its not like I spend a lot of time trying to shoot any particular subject.
I shoot homeless people, graffiti, buildings, just random shit really.
Its odd to me really to realize that people see a large lens and assume you know what you're doing
Odd really
We are who we are though
We're all built of 'the crooked timber of humanity'.
Posted by Rob Kiser on August 26, 2012 at 5:59 PM
Comments