Working Holiday: How It All Fits Together

It's a national holiday today, so I can take it off from work. Funny thing about freedom, though, it doesn't always work out the way you'd hoped. Freed from my dreary routine, I decided to take a walk.

Taking my camera, I figured this was a chance to enrich the "pending SI" file I maintain on my laptop. That is where upcoming photos of the streets around me are stored for my photo blog, Sidewalk Images.

Today, however, we came up empty, my camera and me. We saw all the assorted stuff -- plants, trash, cars, people, pets, fixtures, buildings with their slants and angles -- but we couldn't take any photos.

So, I did what I had to do. I published no image, just my admission of the failure of obtaining any image.

Turns out photographers can lose their voice also.

Since I haven't been eating much lately, and in celebration of the holiday, I had steak and eggs for breakfast. On my recent walk with friends in Mill Valley, I'd secured a handful of Laurel Bay leaves, which I grilled the sirloin in.

Steak?

I got it cheap. Safeway has these periodic sales, where you can get them for a buck each. The nice thing about bay leaves is they not only infuse the meat with taste, they aromatize your entire house.

A natural air freshener.

So now I sit here, back from my empty walk, with an empty day and an empty agenda. The silence again closes in around me, and the writing voices erupt. "Do this!"

"No, do that!"

It's Veteran's Day, a time to honor all of those who have served our nation, even when the cause wasn't a just one. They never got to choose; they followed orders. They were brave even when they didn't know whether it mattered.

Maybe it always matters to be brave. Courage comes in many forms, large and small. It's hard to be brave enough to put yourself out there, to do what you can, even to be free.

My camera is held together by duct tape, anyway. It's really hard to take photos anymore. The duct tape stretches, and the photo-taking fails. If only I could use duct tape to fix all the other parts of my life that are broken, solving this mess would be easy.

But something tells me it's not going to be easy, not this time.