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When letters are arranged in words, I read them. When I can’t find words, I’m invited to assemble my own.

Environmentalism is popular. Regardless of this popularity’s value as an approach to the problems of pollution and energy conservation, it creates a cultural space for valuing what we leave behind.

We don’t throw things away. We hand them off.

I actually spend relatively little time looking down when I walk, even though most of my photographs are taken of low things. Those things on the ground experience a filtering process. They are dropped or discarded. They get broken and crushed. If they are valuable, they get picked up. What remains is free of purpose and meaning. I can give to each thing a meaning free from personal utility or value.

I need to spend more time looking down into myself.

During a particularly grim commute, I looked up in the rain and saw cardboard hearts dangling from a telephone pole. I counted four.

This morning I walked by and counted six. Looking at the first photo, I can see now that there were more than four. The others were just hidden. Looking at this later photo, I can see that there are probably more. I’ve been needing to remind myself that there are these hidden heart hanging up there.

I know that what I see is real, or rather that I really see. What I determine, assume, or conclude about what I see–that’s where I start to loose confident. When I start making statements about what things mean, I get genuinely lost. My ideas get confounded with prejudices and desires.

When it doesn’t matter much, being lost can be fun.

When I see a spoon, I feel safe in knowing it’s a spoon. When I see me reflection stretched on it, I feel at ease knowing that it is a reflection of me. When I imagine that because I am seeing myself stretched in a spoon I should try to see myself reach beyond my usual boundaries, it is just a fun mess.

Most of the inspiration I get from streetfinds can attributed to distraction. I’m thinking about a puzzle or a problem, and am trapping my mind in thinking the same way over and over. Then I start looking around.

Seeing this shoe mark a step on a path in transition helped me realize that what I was thinking about was on a level that would soon end and that I could to step up once and continue, or stand still. The steady climbing I was doing wasn’t going to work.

It’s easy to see things as they aren’t.  The older I get, the more I find value in being wrong.  Of course, in most situations it’s important and urgent to be correct, or to withhold opinion.  Every year, though, these situations seem fewer and fewer.

It’s important to know when to brake while driving and to be right about which end of the knife has a point on it and what to say when you’ve upset someone. On and on. But so much of life isn’t that important at all. My brain makes a gazillion little judgements a day that don’t matter to me or anyone else. That over there is a bottle cap. The lyric of that song is “you’ve been tussled”. My foot itches.

When I walk, I see cars and people and streets and sidewalks. Those are important. Nearly all the rest can be wrongly perceived. I was certain that included photo was a worn decal of a dog running. The idea of a dog running so enthusiastically, the idea of a worn decal, the idea of a decal no longer attached to what it was; all of that was a perfect reply to the what my mind was working on when I saw it. I snapped a picture.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t a decal. And it still doesn’t matter that I was wrong.

I’ve been taking a hell of a lot of glove pictures.  I can find more than a dozen gloves in a single walk.  I take pictures of about four out of every five I see.  I have thousands of glove pictures.  I find the postures of fallen gloves extremely expressive.  More than any other type of trash I see, they have much to say.

In describing this habit to a friend recently, I recalled when I used to work in direct mail.  Change of address requests were sometimes fulfilled by someone or something placing the correction label on a catalog, and then some postal worker copying the catalog onto cardstock.  I guess the difference in weight made up for the extra labor and materials.  I would get stacks of these cardstock returns mixed in with returned catalogs.  Every twenty or so of these copies had a part of the hand holding the catalog down on the copier glass.  Sometimes it was a fingertip, a chipped nail, a watch band, or sometimes the whole hand hovering in the darkness above image.  I collected those too.  Some of them can be seen in the include nixon treatment.  I did alot of stuff with these hand images: I included them in letters and gifts, left them around my desk and house, scattered them around town.

I haven’t done anything with the glove photos yet.  Any ideas?