Tuesday, November 10, 2009


Honest blogs can be embarrassing sometimes. But then I believe that within limits a blog is a web log. And a web log is a digital diary. If I wanted to stress this idea I would begin every day’s blog with that ever so quaint Dear Diary, …

Sometime in the mid 60s I was a room boarder in a home owned by a retired U-boat man and his wife. I was in the Argentine navy and because of my English I was spared the horror of a small destroyer bobbing and yawing in the South Atlantic and had the privilege of a desk job and an Irish/Argentine secretary. I also had the choice of living in barracks and be subjected to vicious petty corporals who liked to play soldiers in earnest or I could opt to renting a room. I chose the latter. To pay for the room I worked as a waiter in a bar in the Boca on weekends.

I was 22 years old.

This is something the submariner’s wife could not understand. She would get angry at me when I had uncontrolled nighttime fluid emissions and I would “dirty” her pristine sheets. I tried to explain to her that I could not control my nighttime subconscious. So she insisted I sleep with a towel under me and over me. When I started getting dreams involving the Gestapo I decided to bid the submariner goodbye.

Now at age 67 when I walk on Granville on the odd late evening (something I do not do with any regularity) I do not look at the noisy bars (the noise has to make up for the lack of smoke or perhaps noise used to be dissipated by tobacco smoke) with any kind of jealousy or longing. I do not wish to be young and be looking for a woman or a partner or someone I may want to live with or marry. That is in my past. Perhaps the only advantage of youth that I am truly jealous of is that idea of falling in love, of even falling in love for the first time.



Time dulls all that and I don’t see myself dumping Rosemary, selling the house and buying a brand new Maserati to try to capture a lost youth. The Maserati I still own, is rusting in the garage and there is no way I will bring back my pipes. I would feel like that Playboy guy. He has no idea of what it is to have grace in old age and to make an unburdensome exit. Besides I can see at least one bed towel in my future as the body inevitably lets go of controls.

All this is but a prelude. It is an overture (if I am going to be repetitive about all this). It is setting up the reason for posting these two pictures here. There would be other pictures but there are self-imposed restraints that prevent me from showing you that not only does Quilla have a face to launch a fleet of triremes but a body that in water would have prevented that Eureka moment for Archimedes who would have sunk into his bath with a heart seizure.

We have had Quilla twice as one of our nude models at Focal Point. The first time was last year. She did not have a bank of tattoos all over her body. She has only one on her ankle (away from other more relevant areas) and would you guess that it has a saying in Spanish? It is something about the fact that if you don’t dare you won’t get anywhere.

It is my premise here that when one has arthritic pinkies (my case at the moment), a sore elbow (result of having broken it a couple of years ago) and when sustainability is simply, and, alas, only, being able to stay in bed in the morning, with some measure of controllable discomfort, in spite of having to go to the bathroom, any opinions I may have about the fair sex must be purely objective, with no vestige of desire or anything else.

This is comforting in many ways. It means that I may just approach Quilla in some future project that will help me sustain my interest in this momentarily unsustainable profession of mine which is photography.