Space Prince / El Barranquillero (All In the Pretty Past)

A most beautiful thing floated into San Francisco last spring...but I think that was it. Me? Who delves into the meat? Was blinded?! So much pink and sun and brown and red and beating beating beating how did that happen? He is innocent. Is a Pope Innocent. Is a Clueless Prince. Here, he looks unamused/disgusted/nervous...in general, he looks insecure, sweet, happy...In retrospect, who wouldn't want the affection I am wont to give? In retrospect, have you SEEN the women in Spain, Ibiza, Germany?...where he moves through life wondering why his loves don't last...In retrospect, born three days apart in the same year, we are both beating hearts with roots in the same country... but he has wings and I have heavy feet...he acknowledges his flights of fancy and considers them real...dreams / life are the same for him...!!! He does not consider that he must eventually wake up!!! I dance heavily, firmly planted to where I am because rent is due...because I want to make real things really happen, and really kiss real faces, not because I am not an escapist by nature / in spirit, whatever...This tall, fancy prince loves me, he does, but he mistook my letters for just more saharaisms...you know the type...I forgive him because I was always only ONE way with him, from the minute I saw him that Thursday dangling about in our living room...So nothing could grow...would never have...it just slapped me in the face and barreled its way forward, towards nothing...I understand...In retrospect, I needed Beni to come through my solar system...to stand in as a representation of something akin to a conch, or an amphitheatre, a back board...I needed to see myself act like this: affected / blind / off kilter / faithful---not in him or me but in IT...that the world sometimes delivers...sometimes...it's a beautiful thing...to realize that my sensors can and will be on...when the next thief is delivered...cash on delivery...

Molly... (La Petite / The Monkey)

Molly was my father's first long term 'girlfriend' after Madukes moved out of our apartment at 1314 Fulton Street in San Francisco...Perhaps because she was so young, and artistic, and wild and insane and nurturing and exposed...did I love her so much. She actually was my big sister. Hmm. She was a perfect 5 foot 100 lb specimen. By perfect I mean tortured, alcoholic, detrimentally honest, verbose. Yes - perfect. I used to paint tennis shoes and faces on t-shirts with her. She had that box of 100+ Pentel colored markers. She ate Hawaiian bread mostly and was a bartender in Union Square, before the commercial bullshit took over. She wore tight Levis and leather jackets. Her hair was a cascade of dirty blonde waves. She cackled. She cut it up. She had transparent, knobby hands and fingers; funny fingernails...She offered me sips of Moosehead...She wore rings on her thumbs...One painfully memorable New Year's Eve wherein my Father steamrolled over to her house late at night, she put me to bed, sobering up as necessary in the presence of a 10 year old...And this winter, while visiting Pop in England, he recounted a beautiful story that took place that one summer he decided to bail out on life over to Barcelona/Morocco in the vain pursuit of a very vain woman...La Petite Molly emerges from that story as a champion...a lioness...a confident marvel of a now grown woman who was moved to leave one continent for another at the drop of a hat to essentially say just three things...after all, delivering the message in person...planting your feet in front of someone...on a train...bound for Paris...that trip propelled her into the stuff of novels!....maybe it marked the end, or the beginning...it's all the same sometimes...Anyway, as their relationship dissolved, so did ours. I wrote her 15 years later from college, maybe my junior year...2002? She had moved to North Carolina and was trying to progress from the bar to the kitchen. I never heard from her.

Her last name is Fitzgibbon...The Monkey.

Tates / Tudor / The Tudors c.1997

Ack! Two Young Taters, 1997.

Tater is, without NO doubt, a better friend than me. Also: person. She is cleaner, a better cook, a better instruction follower, a better writer, more domestic, a better learner, more responsible, smarter, more decent, more organized, more respectful, more logical and level-headed, and more trust-worthy...than me. We shared one identity between the two of us for about 10 years somewhere in there...this scared people. They didn't know how to sit back and appreciate, or get in between, or even communicate with or around us...so it goes...There is nothing she doesn't know about me. I would sometimes feel like that was too much...and when I felt like this, like I was 'sharing' too much (unpressed) I would recoil in a violent, resentful way that I thought was subtle...this happened every 8 or 9 months...and she would sense it. and we would fight. and i would never know what the actual issue was. and she would be patient. and then pack me a sandwich for work like i was her fucking baby! annnnnnnnnnnd she calls them like she sees them...in truth she is the keeper of everything tragic gross embarassing ugly vulnerable painful that has transpired in my life. no story she doesn't know or even moment or a feeling that maybe lasted 24 hours, nothing that she doesn't remember...there is nothing she doesn't know about me. or you, for that matter...she could probably write my story for me...in fact, maybe she already has..we spent most of jr. high and high school on the telephone with each other, making fun of people, creating and nurturing our own language, weeding out assholes and always coming back to our party of two, getting good grades, loving our mothers, trying to learn how to grow, and raiding 99 cent stores along desolate stretches of the central valley...i will never be homeless as long as this motherfucking human bean is alive. whoever she marries should expect a very old borja to move in if i have not found something as worthy and wonderful as her.

for the record, she has a beautiful backside...just one of her many assets...the most important of course being her ability to sustain love for her best friend, an often bipolar stretch of desert never completely at rest...right, there's another one..she is also more humble, and i talk about myself all the time.

Baby Girl

I met Sarah C Garelle when she was 7. I was 7, too. She was a beast. Slamming doors. Like oil / water with her father. Tears. Screams. Drama. Competitive. Intelligent. Passionate. Envious. Peaches and Cream. In 4th grade she played Juliet in the Shakespeare play...she wore a glorious white dress with gold trim...her hair was long and copper and she delivered her lines with an expertise incongruous with her age...she never flubbed her lines. She was not shy. She shone. She developed a small crush on the kid who played Romeo...(obviously)...but unfortunately, life did not imitate art and while she read into her lines, he was a lame 10 year old (sorry) who said the words 'love' and 'juliet' like he was saying cup, chair, or bus...d-r-a-b...

Anyway---there is more to say about Sarah, endless endless anecdotes. But I have to skip the years 1990-2008 to just say that baby girl delivered a baby boy this week...in the water, without meds..."i deserve a medal, i think...." she says...yes baby girl, you and 52% of the population from the beginning of time until the end of the universe! But this is how us only children think...we. are. special...and we consider ourselves only children even though we spent every summer and every day and many years in the same bed and room and house and soccer field and pool and car and bathroom and sleeping bag...under the stars on a deck in modesto, california, when it was too hot to sleep inside...we tick like sisters, though...no nuance missed no reference unchecked no memory not shared...right now our lives are as different as...hmm, as she and i...only now am i realizing it might have been a much lonelier childhood without her...we gave each other license to be young, honest, off-the-cuff, lewd, mean, loving. highs and lows, but mostly joy, like motherhood.

mather graham steele, b. july 14th 2009.

Fruit Man - Figgs, Nuts, 'Nanners (Avenue of the Americas, All Year)

Yesterday this man threw a plum at me from 30 feet away. I caught it, therefore justifying my not paying for said plum. A few months ago, he asked me to take a trip to Atlantic City. "How are you my friend...." he coos...to everyone, I suspect...this photo was taken 9 months ago, in a hurry, a little too much to the right, static teeth face...but so it goes...this is one of those acquaintances, like Carlos from 600 California Street in San Francisco, that is specific to time and place only...we don't go anywhere, unless we go together...or unless I suddenly get the feeling it's time to hit the big time along the Jersey shore...

Now Lemme Take A Trip Down Memory Lane (RIP Henry Allingham)

...because nothing is permanent...especially not the summers in san fernando, cali... ESPECIALLY especially not a family's happiness especially not a nucleus especially not a party that you wish would last and last and last forever especially not the thrill of the chase or the possibility of something yet-to-be-attained...none of that lasts...again i marvel at the proof of time and the photo and the testament and in time it all feels heavier...for those of you who don't feel the gravity of moments while they're happening, but anyway... mostly i pick this photo because of how pop is standing exactly like his pop, from the tilt of his head to the bend and sit in his right leg and hip...copy cats, copy cats, we're all copy copy cats...

Wiggy Woman (2 of 2)

Mission Street, San Pancho...I don't remember what Miss Thing and I discussed at this bus stop...I think this was 2005...Of all the people I've passed on foot on Mission Street day after day after month after year, I only saw Wiggy Woman one time... Sometimes I let people pass me by or willingly pass them by, but most of the time I hate myself for a few minutes after the fact...Sometimes it's a lazy thing, sometimes I'm on the goddamn phone, or am carrying too many bags, of fucking dance clothes with shoes hanging off the bag straps...I hear photographers travel light, aside from the camera(s)...(Frank Fournier has worn the same pragmatic outfit since 1975, guaranteed...)...I'm tired of being a bag lady... (in the proverbial sense, too)...I wanna be weightless in the streets again and am trying to negotiate that with this altered (improved?) self that has just emerged from the ICP...Did nothing change? Is it possible I'm more confused? Hmm. Heady...Anyway, what this release means is that I've re-realized there are still faces for the taking out there! There's this entire uneaten Apple I'm about to worm through...and sometimes that's the thing with patience + photography...the biggest commitment one could make really...knowing that the return isn't tomorrow PER SE, it's at the very end, the culmination, the group, the context, you --- on a continuum...but you keep going back...and that's refreshing / exciting / motivating...tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow...like Mikey writes...for everyone there's that one thing that keeps them comin' on back / just one thing keeps me comin' on back / on back...

or at least, there really should be...else the whole shit just passes you by.