Making pictures and eating … together? If there are two things I love its photography and macaroni and cheese. So how could I bring together my avocation and what I consider to be an entire food group? Go to the Bloomsburg Fair Mac & Cheese Festival in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. I recently found out about this and thought it could be a great photo op for my work towards the Monalog Collective’s “Visions of America” project I’ve previously written about. Not bad … make some pictures, try 10 mac and cheese samples, check out the Biergarten, and get a souvenir glass. Worth the $25 price of admission for sure. About two hours from my house, this confluence of art and gastronomic delight would neatly fit within my two hour plan rules … I’ve written about that too. Is this great or what!!! Well, that was the plan.
The problem is that sometimes plans or best intentions don’t work out for any number of reasons. In this case, I had one of my occasional bouts with benign vertigo. What is benign vertigo you ask? According to the Internet it’s a condition that exists when tiny “canalith particles (otoconia) break loose and fall into the wrong part of the semicircular canals of the inner ear.” It’s a little disconcerting when you get out of bed and the room starts spinning around or when you happen to fall down for no particular reason.
This situation was going on for a few days, but I had got an appointment with a therapist on Saturday morning. Perfect. She would put me through some positional changes designed to shift the pesky little particles back to where they belonged and I would be quickly on my way! The car was packed and I thought I would leave directly from her office and drive the roughly 100 miles to cheesy heaven.
Turned out to be a little more severe then expected. While going through the positioning motions things started to spin really, really fast. Warp factor 8, but hey, no problem. Getting ready to leave she told me that I might feel a bit off, tired, dizzy or just not myself for 24 hours. In other words and it might be best not to go. Right. Got in my car and started to drive. Ok, I didn’t feel so great and pulled over a few minutes later until things felt a little more normal. Feeling a little better I figured I’d start driving again. All’s well until about two minutes down the road when what I’m seeing appears to be coming towards me then racing back to where it was. Not good.
Yeah, I hate when someone is right and I can’t do what I want #@!$%^. I pulled over, collected myself and drove home at a moderate speed. When I arrived, my wife was happy to see me. She agreed with the therapist which meant she was right too. Damn! What to do? Get into bed and zone out for three hours or so. When I woke up I felt a lot better. Problem was that I had missed the opportunity to get to the festival.
I felt bad, and the $25 ticket was the least of it. Missing out on all that gooiness, what might have been some great photo opportunities and the experience I would have had making those pictures. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I think about pictures I hope to make. I actually see them in my head. Sort of my own version of “previsualization”! In this case I was thinking about the people I would encounter for the last couple of days, what they might look like and pictures I would make. Oh well, didn’t happen.
As in life, there is often disappointment in photography. Either, the light isn’t right, what you expected turns out to be a nothing, your compositions stink, there’s something wrong with the negative, or something comes up that causes you not to be able to go. It’s easy to feel sorry for yourself over a lot of important and unimportant things, like missing a Mac & Cheese Festival, and use that as an excuse to get down on yourself, or worse yet to stop what you’re doing. Don’t do that!
So what am I going to do? I took it easy for the rest of the weekend, just like the therapist and my wife recommended. Now I’m refreshed, ready to make some good pictures and catch up on my darkroom backlog.
And maybe I can talk my wife into making some Mac & Cheese this week.
Stay well,
Michael