The camera was made to the detriment of human perception. With lens in hand, photography becomes a hunt for the best picture, the best angle. The perfect shot. In that search, in that obsession for pixelated meaning, one usually forgets to take in reality-to pause and look and really reflect on what’s actually there. So, for all their facsimilic ability, in trying to capture authenticity, photographs more often than not skirt it aside for artistic effect.

For future reference, no cameras on vacation. 

Shiiiiiit. Dug my own grave and sat in it. It’s real cold down here.

The gloom combed itself aside, and the sun shone bright, beaming down little fiery snowflakes of dust, and all the while, I was still at my lab bench.

15k, Balt.: Bursting through the cloud canopy, the mist parted and sun flooded the cabinside. Here, at the top of the world, the ground below us was not littered green, but a mat of whipped whiteness. From this landscape, soft gorges melted into the sky and nebulous peaks wisped upwards, the fingers of light fickly dancing around them both. Pressing my nose against the pane plastic, I felt faint heat from atmospheric cold. No wonder heavenly imagery is iconized here.

Landing, Min: We ducked violently below one last veil of clouds, and immediately, the scenery darkened. What vestiges remained of the pallid brilliance above had been mostly muted by twenty meters of stratic dampening. Shafts of light needled through a few gaps between the billows. The effect was just like being underwater. We’d plunged nose-first into the sky-sea.

Takeoff, Min: The wingtips were at full brightness, two blots of indigo and red slicing through saturated dusk. Climbing at500 milesper hour, the rain whizzed past, no longer particulate, but as beams of water, catching the headlights and throwing them off into space. A gaudy neon blizzard of these precipatatory stars flew by, and for the moment, it both looked and felt like someone had put their foot on the hyperdrive.

Poetry and other forms of writing spend a lot of time trying to find spiritual (though not necessarily religious) symbolism, design, and sense in an inherently purposeless world. This is true for art in general, but because wordplay abstracts itself from communication, it’s largely more descriptive.

But meaning is whatever you make it to be. Meaning is subjective. Meaning is personal. It’s what things are to you. It is you. So writing really should be less about trying to find overarching meaning that isn’t there, and more about making your own.

I love it when the clouds part suddenly, and gray turns to color.

Where a pebble is a boulder

A boulder a mountain

A mountain a world.

A pinhead of water is a pond

A weave of silk a noose

A berry, a feast.

The light can have a shape and a color.

And the smell of the wind is an essay.
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I watched two horseflies doing a mating dance today. Even between the most annoying of creatures, courtship is quite beautiful.