'Living on Love'

Back from the hospital for two days -- so sick in the E.R. waiting room - looked so bad I didn't have to wait with the other 85 people waiting to see a doctor, they just ushered me in right away and soon started giving me morphine.

Spent two days in a bed, never once getting out of it except to lose almost ten pounds of 'water weight' if you can guess what that is . . . . ' I won't answer questions about that . . . except to say that my kidneys work superbly and it's the plastic stent designed to bypass the stone that is there no longer, and the stent and pain was obstructing the flow, and now they'll remove the stent that causes to much excruciating pain 'when the schedule allows -- meaning weeks or even months and in the meantime, maybe they say, I can get around if they load me with some of the world's strongest narcotics -- and I hope they are right because my life has been hell for over a month with pain interfering with anything but being in bed -- anathema to a 'street' photographer.

Morphine - sweet bringer of Morpheus -- for me brought only the most awful, bizarre and scary of nightmares -- enough to make one swearing off sleep entirely, unless tempered with something to blow away the nausea (bringer of nightmares, I found, and brush away the awful thoughts of my skeleton closet of night horrors that I never knew was there -- and perhaps just was invented for the purpose of having to try to sleep in the hospital loaded with narcotizing, vomitacious morphine (before they gave me an emetic.)

Even almost 24 hours later, I can remember those horrible nightmares, and the order in which they came. If they came with regularity, they could throw one off regular mental health entirely, but I think they are only temporary and avoidable with using Morphine as it appears I must for the foreseeable future.

They loaded me up with narcotics of a kind no ordinary citizen can even broach with his doctor before the doctor starts phone the authorities, before sending me out the door, complaining to me that their 'urology staff'' was sorely underfunded, and the urology surgeon's promised visit never materialized -- a doctor, I am sure known far and wide for her beauty, promised a visit by that surgeon, and it just evaporated (she didn't suggest - but actually TOLD me he would come, and she also told me he was trying to work out with her an early 'surgery' which her department head explicitly said was probably not so.

In the end I was told surgery might not come for a very long time (if at all, I lamented half openly).

She, a Persian-American talked about the Revolution in terms of protesters representing 'the other guy' [Mousawi] against who apparently is the good guy (Ahmadinijad), and when I was entrusted to her care for acute pain management, didn't manage to sign orders for my first injection after the request for a good 5-1/2 hours, leaving 1me wanting to scream, but knowing in a hospital, people scream and die and nobody really cares.

I once was in another hospital emergency room (Silicon Valley) after a minor accident, was told the coded loudspeaker message 'Dr. Blue, Dr. Blue, come to the (name of department) really meant someone had died in the hospital.

The Emergency Room at that semi-famous hospital did not lament the death, but instead broke out in cheers - 'someone had died -- AHA -- they had just one more bed to put someone into!!' That's hospital gallows humors.

In such a place if one actually confronts the issue of how much pain is around oneself and does not erect a wall against that pain that surrounds, one will be out of the doctoring and hospital business very soon, because of a damaged psyche -- soon become just plumb out of empathy - not enough to share with all those souls who would suck that empathy dry, then ask for more, more more, and when that was exhausted, demand even more.

So, anyone who truly asks for empathy in a substantial hospital will get an expression, but the staff on my floor was too busy partying the night away last night with raucous laughter and jokes from the nursing station to be heard throughout the floor of sleeping patients - one could tell they had an hours-long joke fest and anecdotes galore to share as they were surrounded by pain - invasive pain, as they practiced their group diversion to cover their group psyche and cement their fellowship (no mater that I truly hadn't slept in two days and they were depriving me of much needed sleep -- sleep of patients is something that really 'doesn't matter' at a floor nursing station when there are good jokes to tell and raucous laughter to send down the halls as patients like me get jolted awake from outrageous, vomitacious nightmares (together with enough pain to melt the Statue of Liberty into a puddle of copper.

No one resents those people trying to hang onto their sanity -- which prompts the gallows humor of the operating room.

One nurse I briefly dated in times past, explained to me that when a fellow was being operated on, that it was the female 'nurse's prerogative' wherever she worked as an Operating Room nurse (several prominent Silicon Valley hospitals clamored for her services) to do the 'rites' of evaluating the male penis and its potential size and length at erection - all for their delight before getting down to really serious operating room business.

She did not admit to every being punished for that -- it seemed to be some sort of 'ritual' she revealed, and not commonly discussed . . . . but ever present in her experience.

At the same time, in lawsuits women complain when so-called 'sleep dentists' get caught (justifiably so) copping a feel (or much worse), when their female patients are numbed away with nitrous oxide or any other gaseous sedative of the day.

Those men dentists go to jail and lose their licenses -- but my operating nurse friend du jour claimed only 'understanding looks' by her male cohorts -- who probably got a good look at their attractive sedated female patients, as was strongly suggested by her (and she was a pretty good reporter of facts).

All in all, with all the dissembling (which is a diplomatic word for something so close to lying that one can hardly tell the two apart) by various medical staff where I treated, all to inveigle me into taking certain treatment actions (certainly not all staff, and certainly not the head of the department of Medicine where I treated who was straight as an arrow in my book and some other outstanding personnel), it seems that misleading the patient is the order of the day in many circumstances rather than the the way in which things are to be ordered. (name of hospital intentionally withheld and will not be revealed).

I was invited (by the chief muckety-muck of the medicine department where I was treated to 'walk into hospital administration to voice my concerns about such dissembling and other bureaucratic SNAFUS (Situation Normal, All Fouled Up), that because of dissembling about 'promises, outcomes, dates and risks, this facility was almost certainly battering patients and a certain number were going to either die or give up on life for failure to best the system, and simply get poor to worse results (including death) because of that.

I think I was so clear-headed in the way I explained myself, he felt that complaints of his he long had voiced to his own administration, would get a better hearing from me, an articulate (and clear reporting outsider) if I took them personally to Administration. At least he asked that I consider doing so, and encouraged me to do so. In a way, I felt I would be his surrogate. (good politics on his part, or just a smart man caught in a unresponding bureaucracy, or both?)

(I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt . . . . and do NOT expect a guaranteed result from surgery or any medical procedure, but when a timetable is laid out or a certain course of therapy is promised (and on a timetable) then in retrospect when it becomes clear that timetable was never serious -- it becomes a matter of 'dissembling' on the part of all who lay out that 'timetable' - remember, the synonym or near synonym for dissembling - lying or fraudulent representation - about which I could write a learned treatise from my study of law and long-ago practice of same - and there is more than one kind of lie.

(E.G. a lie is something you know is false and tell is true when you KNOW it is false, it also is something you don't know if it is true or false, but you represent you know it to be true when you don't actually know anything and you are aware you don't know, etc., and of course that overlaps into the tort of deceit (one is in 'contract' and the other is in 'deceit', but they essentially mirror one another. Also, a promise to perform, which performance is not truly intended to be performed [addendum: applies to a schedule to perform too, in my book]

(There are other definitions, also, and this is NOT that treatise.)

I have found out (something I have known a long time), that the patient who does not go in with a grudge will get the best treatment from everybody and that if that patient listens and records carefully (mentally or otherwise) the promises made, then tells those who said those promises, some will deny every having said them (those whose professionalism may be a little lacking,I think) and others will say that they said those things but later add qualifiers, (which they did not ever express when they made the representations, and I have great ear for such qualifiers - as a one-time attorney, I listen carefully for the qualifiers - e.g. 'we will do thus and so IF (followed by qualifiers, as opposed to 'we will do thus and so'. (absolutely, no qualifiers).

In a great many cases it will come to no harm and I don't kick (s**t) just to be doing that, but when I am disabled one or two months because of false promises and insinuations, that is quite another

I see that hypocrisy is alive and well at either end of the food chain.

The guy with the pit bull looks like he would slit your throat in a heartbeat, and probably love doing so. Great capture. The positioning of those two lights directly above the head of the guy with the sign , could well be inspiration for a few interpretations.

Your comments are 'wonderful' and add greatly to my understanding of the subtleties of this photo.

As photographer, I experienced the guy with the pit bull as a most sympathetic guy, not as you see him,but in the photo, as you see him is as he should be seen -- not as I 'felt' him, as that has no photographic validity. Thanks for helping me keep that straight.

As for the two lights above the other guy's head - light's analogous to devil's horns, or something analogous, is that what you had in mind -- again, not how I experienced these two rather nice guys, but my depiction may show differently, and in fact may reveal a truth whether or not I experienced it.

In fact on the street, I have met and had good discussions with people who I think later have turned out to be some VERY nasty people, but experienced the nice part of them, so I'm not the one to be able to judge their personalities 'as a whole'.

I met a guy in McDonald's in the LA ghetto, in his '70s, who told me of his machinations to get his disability pension (so it would be tax free) and it was fascinating, and later, I saw a photo in the paper about a serial killer found by DNA, and somehow it looked like the same guy. Was I wrong? The guy had a serious and strange twisted mind, but interesting none the less and he wasn't about to strangle me in McDonald's in the ghetto, so I didn't experience any evil in him, though thorough perseverance. (and lacking television footage, I can't really tell if it's the same guy -- they locked him up and only issued serial photographs, but it seemed he worked for the same public agency . . . . . hints of the television show to end all creepy television shows -- 'The Twilight Zone' written by Rod Serling.

The 'street photographer' meets all kinds, and those I experience as possibly kind and cooperative may be capable of all sorts of mischief.

Thanks for helping focus my eyes on my image, not my heart.

(You always add something important to my interpretation of my photos.)

John (Crosley)

Other than the time I am engaged in direct conversation with others, or those sometimes very long times when I am writing about things and engaged in organizing my thoughts -- which sometimes appear here, however tangentially to the subject of photography (like my last comment above, which explains partially why people have not seen new postings from me for a while) the writing process for me is easy -- I just start writing, and when I'm done, I stop. Nothing difficult about it at all. I reread usually to make sure I make clear sense and sometimes edit, but that's about all.

I just write what I feel, and those feelings come from my intellectual side and my emotional side, and the course of writing helps me organize. I typed the California Bar examination essay portion and was 20 minutes ahead of any other typist in the very large room. I think through the typewriter or other keyboard. It's second nature.

Though partially paralyzed in my right arm/hand, I can, however, type, at great speed, and without that, I would never be able to write the tomes that sometimes others find 'interesting' or that sometimes might put others to sleep.

The writing, of course, is 'optional' -- I am sometimes astonished by the enormous feedback I get (almost all complimentary) about what I write, as well as by my photographic postings.

I used to be a professional writer -- albeit a news writer and for one year a magazine writer for a business magazine, and in the course of events often would talk to Sam Walton (among many other retail execs) as often as twice a week (Walton founded Wal-Mart, world's largest retailer). Can you imagine?

He often, in fact, called me, to tell me his latest thoughts on a particular matter as he built his chain up and tried to steer it clear of the behemoth K-Mart by keeping his chain in smaller towns than K-Mart thought it could make money in.

In fact, fear of K-Mart competition is probably what allowed Wal-Mart through Mr. Sam (as he liked to be called), to adopt his prominence and his wily business strategy which allowed store managers great autonomy at picking merchandise for their stores (especially at the first when his stores were concentrated in the Deep South) as well as trumpeting that their merchandise was "Made in the USA' when in truth, that slogan was long eclipsed and on close examination, much was actually made in China or elsewhere.

I can write like the wind, if the subject falls into a category I have had experience in, and at an age of many decades and falling across many different professions (lawyers, of which I was one once, delve into a great number of professions almost daily), and that plus my one-time career in journalism and a first class education at Columbia College, NYC (where Obama went as an undergrad before going off to Harvard Law), I long have been a person of great intellectual ferment.

I assisted a Columbia University Vice President and traveled with world famous intellectuals around the country, giving presentations -- august literary, economic, political, or other luminaries whom most people would never ever meet in a lifetime were often my seatmates as we rode in limousines or airplanes across the country, or celebrated in a hotel suites after an eventful presentation to Columbia Alumni in places such as Philadelphia, Dallas, and Minneapolis.

Imagine sitting in the back of an American Airlines jet in Detroit (it had bench seats then and serious engine trouble causing a five-hour delay) with Arthur Burns, past and future chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, Eli Ginsberg, former member of the President's Manpower Committee, and Peter Kenan, Kennedy's economic advisor (and me, drinking in all the conversation.)

Or traveling with Lionel Trilling or Jacques Barzun, the two literary lions of the day . . . . . One was afraid to take airplanes -- absolutely phobic and would only travel by train. One favorable word from one of these two in a book review could make an academic's career.

Then, again, there was me. In summers I worked in a lumber mill (or a grocery store, depending on the year. At the end, I steered a commercial ship loaded with bombs and ammunition to Viet Nam and with a camera disembarked in Viet Nam (only to be medi-vacced later to the USA with a gunshot wound suffered in Trenton in the aftermath of the Martin Luther King Riots).

Maybe there is a book in me. I wrote one in January with my photographs, for a self-published volume, just to drop at galleries and museums but bad health and the great cost (139 USD a volume) is preventing me from following through on my plans.

(Everybody who looked through the volume - e.g. picked up the 100p photo book -- never put it down without going to the complete end and always congratulations were routine . . . . . )

Trouble is no one gets any money from publishing; galleries and museums are the place to make money with photos such as I take and both have had the stuffing kicked out of them by the recent economic downturn.

And to mount an exhibition at a gallery, the photographer is expected to supply the prints . . . .at an inestimable cost, since I'm not an adequate printer.

Oh, woe is me.

I may have 20 to 30 books in my on various subjects, photo and non-photo related, and I just have to take the first step, meet the right people and just get started.

I did it once in the news business and millions of my words were published - in news and later in a business magazine. I turned down an editorship of 'Business Week' to go to law school so I could practice law, as I didn't then want to live in NYC, which was a 90% job requirement for Business Week editors.

I'm a careful and discerning writer, who doesn' t usually have to think so much about my writing; I've also been an editor, and I edit myself as I go, so my work usually looks pretty complete when I'm done.

In law school for law review, I was asked with another to edit a manuscript by a world famous expert on criminology. His draft was abysmal. I edited it wonderfully -- the best editing he ever had, I am certain, since I had read earlier works by him (I was chastised for 'overaggressive' editing, since I was to be a 'fact check' editor only, but since I had been in real life a real publication editor I just fixed his words (and often asked him in comments what he really meant to say, since he was so often unclear).

Sometimes you can be too smart and/or conscientious.

He should have shut up, accepted the wonderful editing I gave him and hired me full-time. He might have doubled his readership or more -- I am a great taskmaster for writers who write ambiguously and carelessly.

Ernest Hemingway and I both got our writer's training at the same place: The Associated Press. His resignation reputedly consisted of three words 'Fuck this Job', and he left, or perhaps it was only two words.

I was more polite.

The AP general manager -- the guy who ran the whole shooting match for the whole world -- took me to lunch one day as we often worked together. I was 24. He congratulated my work and my ambition, and said he had devised a way he could back my becoming someday the head of Associated Press.

I was very impressed for about 10 to 15 minutes as he reeled off assignments he might place me into to further my career and better my chances.

Then he handed my my own luncheon check expecting me to pay for my own lunch!!!!

I had a new job in six weeks that paid four times as much and never looked back.

Writing books -- nonfiction at least -- piece of cake, for me for many subjects.

My whole site is loaded with essays -- just by compiling my comments and applying a little editing, or my 'presentation' on 'Photographers: Watch Your Background' one could already have two to five books, that could be published without very much further editing.

In short, this is my epitaph here, if nothing else, or at least my autobiography.

An important book?

Somebody just has to ask me; I have too much to do now, and need a market - someone to buy from me and an advance to live on while I work.

I am never at a loss for words if I know my subject.

And I know to write only about what I know or to add appropriate qualifiers acknowledging my lack of knowledge.

John (Crosley)

This photo has as many comments as my Photo of the Week from Oct. 07.

Thanks my contributors (of course in this case, many are mine, though not quite half, whereas in the other case, my comments were not counted.

I am glad to see so many contributions -- it has kept me hopeful as I have struggled passing a kidney stone, now gone (but the stent inside me makes me just as sick (if anyone considers having a 'stent' to help them get rid of a kidney stone), I can personally give them a 'worst case' scenario -- just e-mail me.

John (Crosley)

John;

Straying way off topic now -- I had gall stones a few years back which was not much fun. The solution the doctors arrived at was to remove my gallbladder, also not much fun. Needless to say, this isn't an option with a kidney. In hindsight, I am not even certain it was a good option for a gallbladder.

Before I made my comment on the guy with the dog I had read your comments on how you got the shot and the way in which events unfolded. I still decided to go with what the photo was telling me, as I considered that a more useful comment. Freezing that single moment from this guy's life and plucking it out for scrutiny, cannot gives us more than a flash of insight into his being , however in that flash he did seem rather menacing.

You just never know what is going on behind the scenes with people. I worked an entire summer with a guy who seemed quite level headed. A year later I saw on the news that he had gone home one night, doused his wife with gasoline while she slept and tossed a match to the bed.

I once worked as a waiter in Columbia University's show sit-down restaurant, and in the kitchen were two cooks, -- one cut the prime rib for the upscale guests -- faculty,students on expensive dates, prominent guests,etc.

One of the men was a Puerto Rican transexual and he was friends with a black cook he worked with -- they often double-dated with sisters and/or girlfriends/boyfriends, I guess.

In any event, one day the black cook got riled at me as the waiters piled up waiting for plates to be filled for guests dissatisfied with slow service.

The black cook took his carving knife for cutting prime rib to my throat and said 'I could cut your throat right here and now . . . you don't believe me do you? You want to try to find out? " I hastily told him that I felt he would have no trouble slitting my throat and eventually things cooled down

(I had not pushed him in any way, but he was hair trigger.)

Fast forward to my last day at Columbia my freshman year.

I was going by taxi to Grand Central Station to catch the train to Chicago, then home to Oregon.

On the front seat was the NY Daily News and this guy's photo was spread across the front page with the words 'Murderer/Rapist Caught'

He had been arrested for cutting the throats and/or strangling very, very old women in Washington Heights section of Manhattan after raping them in elevators of their apartment buildings -- most of them were grandmothers and very old (not your typical sexually attractive young woman at all).

He surely would have had no problem cutting my throat as he had threatened.

I was cool, and I have lived to tell this entirely true story.

If he has been cool, he probably still is in Attica Prison since NY had abolished the death penalty (if he's not been killed in a riot or inmate stabbing). (He was younger than I by a couple of years.)

'STUDENT WAITER SLAIN BY IRATE COOK; NECK FILETED BY WASHINGTON HEIGHTS RAPIST/MURDERER' could have been the headline.

But that never came to pass. They found the murder weapon in his Columbia employee locker/the very knife and other incriminating evidence -- the knife that would have fileted my own neck as he had threatened.

I never was a witness/they had him through fingerprints, the knife and in 100 other ways, so I was supernumerary.

I had been cool, learned my lesson about 'being cool' then and have always kept that in mind when tempers flair.

Thanks for the story, Gordon.

Street photographers have to keep in mind such stories . . . . it goes with taking photos on the street to know that 'nice' guys on the street sometimes are capable of doing awful things and many are not necessarily 'nice' at all.

Treat carefully, those who take 'street' photos -- you never know what your subject (or worse, an observer who is offended while watching you take photos of others) is capable of.

Words to the wise; thanks again Gordon.

John (Crosley)