Author Archives: S.A.H.

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About S.A.H.

Cycling. Espresso. Photography. Words. Travel. Aimlessness.

My Pedals may not be Turning (yet), but my Mind Certainly Is

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I am still ordering things for my bike and my bike trip. I am still sorting out what app(s) I may use for routing and/or recording my trip. I am still designing a route (though that is something that can and will be a semi-daily task). I am still meeting with friends and family before I leave; just this morning I met with a good friend and inspiration over coffee (everything over coffee). Now I am having more coffee, more food, and listing off  things to take care of before I leave (note to self: do actually make a list).

My framebag from Rockgeist arrived a few days ago. It was the last necessary item for my bike that I thought I would need, but alas, that is not the case because the front rack I had ordered to support my handlebar bag that isn’t supposed to need a support doesn’t fit my fork. (In case you’re wondering, there is nothing wrong with my bar bag. There simply isn’t enough space between the top of the front tire and the handlebars for the bag to hang without needing a support. I knew this was a possibility when I purchased, but hoped otherwise.) I’ve just ordered one that will, after messaging Rodeo Adventure Labs for a recommendation. I suspect that will get here Monday. None of this is ideal. But what is ideal, anyway? Are having all of our heart’s wants and desires being fulfilled in a way we want and at our moment’s notice ideal? What if a current moment being disruptive or unwanted yields great joy in the future? Or, what if so insistent on forcing one’s notion of an ideal, i.e., a desire, into RIGHT NOW one unwittingly destroys a more satisfying moment in the future? Again, this begs the question of “what is ideal?” Is it ideal for me to leave on Sunday, or Wednesday? Is there a qualitative difference between the two? I suppose I won’t know until I go, but even then there is no way for me to compare the two scenarios. I wanted to leave a week and a half ago. I’m still here. I say it’s not ideal, but is it not ideal just because it’s not what I wanted (or thought that I wanted)?

“Ideal” is not synonymous with “want” or “desire” but I’d bet most people commonly equate the two. This can make for a lot of unnecessary stress in one’s life that is otherwise avoidable. According to the dictionary app on my Mac “ideal” is defined as “satisfying one’s conception of what is perfect; most suitable.” But even that is subject to much interpretation as is evident in the definition by the words “one’s conception.” What is most suitable for a given situation? Well, different people will likely define that differently. And we can forget about the idea of perfection since it’s simply unattainable (because it doesn’t actually exist, or because it’s so lofty a goal that no human being is capable of reaching to those heights?). Too, what if a person’s goals are unhealthy or crooked? Say I want to be happy, and I have a sweet tooth so that my happiness has a strong correlation with my sugar intake. Well then, eating a dozen donuts a day is an ideal solution to satisfying that sugar craving, and thus my happiness. But, is that really an ideal avenue to happiness? I think not (keep in mind I’m simplifying a complex thing in order to make a point and/or create an argument). Everyone at this point should be familiar with the consequences of too great a sugar intake (potential to develop diabetes, weight gain, rotten teeth, etc.), so, if the goal, to be happy by satisfying my sweet tooth, is itself not ideal, then are the ideal means of reaching that goal really ideal? There’s an old Chinese proverb: “If the wrong man uses the right means, then the right means work in the wrong way.” So, in this case, if the ideal means are used to achieve the wrong goal, then the ideal means work in the wrong way.

Anyway, I’m currently unemployed, so I’m not trying to spend much money since I’m not actually on the road yet. But, my unemployment just means more time to get more important things done. More important than making money? But what could be more important than that? Perhaps that’s a blog post for another day…

New Bicycle, New Preparations, New Journey, New Life

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Nearly two years have passed, twenty-three months to be exact, since I returned from my last bicycle adventure which turned into a motor vehicle adventure, and I am at last preparing for something new.

I like the idea of the new, of newness. I like new things, new people(s), new places, new experiences, new sensations—sights, sounds, smells, flavors, textures. Newness means also freshness. It is the opposite of old or stale. It also implies difference, but this isn’t always the case as newness is often times simply a matter of perception. Is it easy to perceive the same (or the old) as new, as fresh? No, not always, not often, but neither is it impossible. It takes some work, and it takes a quiet, at-ease mind: something too regularly out of reach I think for most people (or so they might think), especially these days with the constant stimulus of a cellphone or tablet in our hand or pocket. To find newness in the old requires that one step back from all the noise, and the more often the better, and relax,  not by reading a book or watching the telly (these are the very things we’re trying to get away from), but by simply sitting still and breathing. Maybe closing one’s eyes if that helps, and then reopening them and having a look around. Better to do this outside at a park or elsewhere in a mostly natural environment, and better still a place of solitude or near-solitude (the quiet nod of hello to another fellow finding his/her own sense of newness can obviously be included in one’s own discoveries). This doesn’t have to take a long time. Ten or fifteen minutes can be a surprisingly invigorating refresher, but I often find it easy to lose track of time and thirty minutes or more will pass easily, as though in fact it hadn’t and you were only in that moment…. But when you look at your watch….

I don’t provide myself the opportunity often enough for this. THERE IS SO MUCH IN THE WORLD SO EASILY WITHIN REACH NOW. Is there really though? I mean it’s certainly near effortless to get exposure to “so much in the world” nowadays, but how authentic is that relative to the greater sensorial experience of going out and doing, of, say, visiting the pyramids of Egypt rather than looking at a picture or video? Anyway, the whole point of this is sort of to say that I’m struggling to find the new in Annapolis, and maybe Annapolis is not for me (I’ve lived in and around it my whole life after all), or maybe I just need to get away for a while. Who knows? Are either of these ideas wrong? Certainly not. They just are. They’re ideas. The truth will be discovered in time.

Originally I thought I was to leave here a year ago. However, one’s thinking about what the future may be is frequently not how that future, then the present, now the past actually becomes. In my case, a year ago I was not in a great hurry to leave, and was quite content, and seeing things new. I also made a great discovery, that being Bitcoin and the rest of the world of blockchain technology, last August and got sucked down that rabbit hole. I believe this will pay off for me, and countless others whether they may know it or not, in a few years time (or perhaps sooner, or perhaps later). At any rate, the stars seem to be aligning (as the saying goes) for an imminent departure now. A bit later in the season than I would prefer as largely I want to be places warm and sunny, but this life is doing the way this life is doing. I’m quite content.

So, yes. This newest blog post of mine has gone on much longer than I anticipated, and in directions I didn’t quite anticipate. The key in all things is not so much to fight it, but to let it flow in the way it wants.  There is a channel already provided. One only has to direct “it” into the channel, and not try to dam the channel up or redirect the flow or whatever other silly things humans like to do to pretend they’re in control. The ideal then, really, is to be simultaneously the funnel and the thing being funneled. To make the decision and also to allow the decision to be made for you.

More updates soon!

A History (Part 2)

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So I got into BMX, then got out of BMX. I was 15 then I was 22. At 22 or so I was going through a depression. Perceived health issues, a lack of direction (not a bad thing unless one thinks it is, and I very strongly thought it was), debt, jobs that couldn’t enable me to get out of debt (they paid too little), parental pressure regarding a college education (my lack thereof) or career path all contributed. It was around this time that I picked up my first camera, a Nikon N65, shortly thereafter upgraded to an N75.

I remember vaguely the first roll of film (color negative, and I think some sort of Fuji) that I shot: some photographs around the Naval Academy Bridge which straddles the Severn River. Beside this bridge is a fishing pier, repurposed from what remains of the old Naval Academy bridge, projecting into the river some fifty yards. I was fascinated with this old bridge, both the interesting views from it—there was a piece of chainlink fence erected along a small portion that chunked up one’s views through it—and what I could find beneath it. I also photographed beneath the new bridge, from shore to shore across the river, between its supports—a popular single-point perspective composition still today. Nearby also were the hulking remains of an old dock restaurant on the river that had given up the ghost. The planks of the docks had been completely removed with the exception of the pylons which obviously weren’t worth the effort of removing, and remained, half rotted away sticking up from the water like so many broken shards. But for some reason my strongest memory is of one specific photo I took: the view projected upward at two excavators in profile parked on the side of the road at the foot of the bridge. The sky is mainly overcast and the excavators are a vivid orange, yellow, and blue. There is a lot of green in the lower half of the photo. In fact, the entire lower half of the photo is green because it was the grass slope leading from the park, where I was standing below, to the highway above. Then there is a portion of the barrier preventing one from driving off the road and down the hill (or into the river depending on how far up the bridge you might be). The excavators are at opposite ends of the picture. A completely forgettable photo of absolutely nothing. I don’t know what attracted me to it. I suppose because I just happened to be there, and it was something to shoot… (The colors of the excavators popped strongly against the white-grey of the sky too.) I had a fairly competent idea of image composure at the time, even for it being my first roll of film, though filling that much of the frame with nothing but grass is as a general rule not recommended (not saying it’s wrong, per se, but it only works infrequently filling the frame with that much of nothing).

The first name I remember knowing that belonged to the world of photography is Henri Cartier-Bresson. He is my most beloved of photographers today, but I can’t say where or when I first heard his name, or how I became familiar with the few images of his that I was familiar with. I had also heard the term “street photography” at some time as well (probably in connection with H.C.B.). This was all before ever picking up a camera, mind you. However, once acquiring my camera I web searched the phrase, “street photography”. On the first page of results, to my best recollection, was a link to a blog by a fellow, Dave Beckerman.

I was to follow Mr. Beckerman’s blog for the next couple of years until he went off into digital HDR-land and I grew disinterested with his photographs. But until that time his blog was a great resource for me, not to mention sheer joy and entertainment to read (he was, and still is, a marvelous writer and storyteller), and I loved his photographs and experiments (dragging a view camera onto a subway car for example).

When I got into photography digital cameras were of course not what they are today, and anybody professional, or anyone who cared about image quality still shot film. Dave was naturally then shooting film at the time, and I think these are his best images, to be honest. I remember early on he was still working for an ad agency (I think), and I remember him writing about leaving his job eventually so that he could focus on photography full-time. He used to sell his photos outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with numerous others, but then realized that he could harness the power of the web and sell online, and so he setup his first store. Of course he was still shooting film at this time, living in his cramped Manhattan apartment, which of course means that he needed dedicated (or at least modular) space for a darkroom, and was making all these prints he was shipping out to people by hand. He eventually bought a film scanner and experimented with that as well. It seems everything he was doing in the realm of photography was an experiment, though at the time all things digital workflow related were experimental, and this I think is one of the reasons his blog was so fascinating for me to read.

He referenced Bob Dylan a lot too.

Anyway, Dave was a big influence on me as I sank my teeth more deeply into photography. Eventually, pulling a bit out of my depression, I moved to downtown Annapolis, where I kinda am today. I started shooting in black & white with a film that could be developed with the same chemicals as color-negative. But not long after making the conversion to black & white I realized that I should probably learn how to develop it myself, partly to save money on processing costs, but also because that magical process that I knew nothing about fascinated me.

There has been for a long time a creative arts school located just on the edge of downtown Annapolis called Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts (fitting name, no?), and this is where I went for my pretty basic classes on film development and print making. I was taught by the venerable Dick Bond, a humorous teacher with somewhat wild, white hair, a sly gleam in his eye (think Doc Emmett Brown, Christopher Lloyd’s character in Back to the Future) and a predilection for shimmering black and white landscape photographs of forests and wetlands patiently shot with a large format camera.

I have since moved on from shooting film to shooting digital, not really because I want to (though I do like the flexibility in being able to convert an image from color to black and white and vice-versa), but because it’s impractical to travel with quantities of film and chemicals (especially when traveling by bicycle), and for the advantages of being able to so quickly edit an image and upload it to something like Instagram for immediate consumption by my legion of fans (that’s a joke, by the way).

I am continually developing new ways of seeing and photographing. The ability to shoot in either color or black and white on my Fuji has been the biggest contributor to this, as well as the trouble with manually focusing through the viewfinder of the X-Pro1 I was shooting with. I think also my initial discovery of photographers like Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, etc., and my rediscovery of them over the last year and a half has influenced to some extent what I think may be regarded as a relevant subject in a photograph. But I think also the paintings of Rembrandt and Caravaggio, and certain modern painters (Piet Mondrian for example) has influenced the direction that I am taking my interpretation of photography, or the photographic world.

A History (Part 1?)

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At what point did photography really strike a chord with me? The most reasonable and likely accurate point in time would have been in high school—so mid to late nineties. I had stopped playing team sports by this time. Eighth grade middle school was my last year playing soccer, the last of the common trifecta of sports played in my school district at that time (the other two being basketball and baseball). I didn’t have much self-esteem going into high school and was anxious over meeting all the new kids. After hearing through the grapevine that in order to qualify for the soccer team one had to run a six minute mile, I knew I wouldn’t make the cut. Or thought I knew I wouldn’t. At any rate, I didn’t even bother trying out for the team, and so a vacuum came to be in my life. Obviously I needed to fill that vacuum with something. Something other than more Nintendo and climbing the same tree in my backyard (also, getting older and kind of tire of climbing the same tree for years at this point).

Growing up in my old neighborhood, a very unique neighborhood I think for such a suburban place—one which is heavily wooded, where so many of the trees tower high, high, and higher over each and every house, and also one in which so many of the homes are architecturally unique, each distinct to its own set of blueprints. In this neighborhood, in the backyard of a corner-house fenced in by pine trees was a mini-ramp, and one day, and for some reason one day only to my recollection, I saw two kids older than I (probably high-schoolers, as I was probably only eleven or twelve) on BMX bikes riding it—dropping in one end, airing out the other. I watched for a short while a little bit in awe before moseying along to wherever it was I was moseying to (probably my best friend’s house just down the road). There was also one other house elsewhere in the neighborhood with a much larger vert ramp on its property, and I have a faint memory of having seen some kids on bikes and skateboards riding that as well. My memories of both these ramps are rather vague and nebulous, unclear, like trying to recall a dream, but they both without doubt laid a seed within me, which at the appropriate time with the appropriate inputs was to grow. It was at this time, leaving middle school, the summer before entering high school, knowing that I wouldn’t be playing any sports, nor taking part in the school marching band (I was vehemently opposed to wearing that silly uniform), that BMX presented itself to me as a way of filling that void of activity while at the same time, and this didn’t register then and I don’t think it registered until years later when I was to stop riding, providing a creative outlet that I never knew that I wanted, at least conciously, so in effect killing two birds with one stone.

So I started riding BMX. Alone to start—how so much of what I do is done—but later on making friends and meeting up and going out together. It began in ninth grade with a GT Performer: chrome plated, mag wheels, and pegs that threaded onto your axles bending them after a few sessions of grinding ledges and curbs. I moved on from there to racing (for two whole weeks) and had a bike (chrome plated) purpose built for this, later to be stolen from my backyard and replaced (yay insurance!) with an S&M Dirt Bike (a classic of the 90’s, and again chrome plated (chrome plated everything was pretty much the tits in the mid 90’s)). It was around this time that I really began to feel like I found a solid group of friends, people who respected me and with whom I could be myself around, a community of outcasts and misfits like myself (even if all of them were not).

Of course with any small, marginalized, and unpopular community of black sheep, mavericks, and misfits such as ourselves, there are people documenting it, whether that be in writing or in photography, but all these people (speaking of the greater community of riders, not our own tiny, local crew) need a platform on which their creative jams and juices may be spread, and of course the less creative of those in said community also need something, some sort of publication, to galvanize them, for them to rally around. Enter magazines—BMX Plus, then later Ride BMX, and Dig—all filled with news, contest recaps, interviews, scene reports, and lastly and perhaps most importantly, photographs.

I don’t ever remember thinking that some day I could be a professional bike rider, though I’m sure it was every kids dream to be one, but I could see myself being on the other side of that camera taking pictures of these dudes getting rad at the trails or on the street. Yet I never picked up a camera when I rode BMX, and when I stopped riding and did purchase a camera for the first time I never thought to go back to document something that was nothing less than a way of life for me at the time. There were, to be sure, practical reasons for this: many of my friends who I once rode with went away to college, still others put down their bikes as I did mine (the group seemingly dissolving in one singular event rather than breaking apart in some sort of chain reaction of various linked events). So who exactly was I to photograph with at this point? I guess in actuality it all really makes sense. The dissolution of the group.

Well, I think this is a fair start to explaining my humble beginnings (as I humbly still bumble along). Perhaps I’ll continue in another post. A follow up to this, digging deeper into the origins of my fascination with the camera and photography. The seed was planted but it still had yet to germinate, to sprout, and to grow.

November 6, 2016, Bit East of Gallup

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A couple miles off is a train, creeping along beneath towering, red, sandstone cliffs spotlighted by the lowering sun and glowing like they had recently been removed from a forge. The train looks like a toy miniature running on plastic tracks amidst an elaborate display set up on a table in an old firehouse.

November 6, 2016, Thinking Outside Gallup, NM

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Gallup, NM, El Rancho Hotel. Huge, just enormous sort of mansion-like place. Above the front porch is a large sign, clearly visible while hurtling along the highway: “Charm of Yesterday, Convenience of Tomorrow.” Fascinating! Already thinking towards the future. Already in the future! I wonder what Tomorrow’s convenience might be like? Is it better than Today’s? How does it work? Does it know what I want before I want it? Will anything and everything, all my wishes and demands simply be brought to me and dropped at my feet? It’s unfortunate that I won’t be staying here, but am instead just passing through. I’m curious as to what this future will be like. Alas, here I am in the present. Sounds like a good business model though because everyone is either infatuated with and looking back to the past, or obsessed with the future. Very few people seem to be content with the present.

November 6, 2016, North Arizona Landscape

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Arizona landscape driving east from Flagstaff to Santa Fe: a flat plain interrupted by shallow ravines, the occasional wash, plateaus, mesas; dotted with pastel, mute, sagey green shrubs large and small. The occasional tree. The colors of the land, various and multitudinous: greys, siennas (burnt and raw), ochres, umbers, oranges, reds. On the whole, unsurprisingly warm.

Ahead, something that lies visible but which I can never reach, tantalizes with its unknowns, its questions: the horizon, a flat line like that which separates, yet holds together, ocean and sky, as if without it they would burst apart and anything and everything would be flung off, ejected, torn into the vacuum of space.

Very much a ranchers’ landscape and, once a wilderness where buffalo freely roamed, and the Navajo with them (or so I might imagine).

Railroad tracks paralleling Interstate 40, and a miles-long train, its individual cars bound together with an invisible string stretching from coast to coast, like a necklace encircling the throat of our mother, Earth.

Signs for Indian gifts, moccasins.
Earlier: “Petrified Wood From the Forest”
“Rugs”
“Indian Ruins Gas This Exit Save”
“Indian Ruins Exit Don’t Miss It”
“Indian Center”

Here is one of the loveliest, most enchanting landscapes I’ve ever experienced. Today the air so clear. The horizon crisp.

Does a horizon have a beginning or ending? Does it simply go on forever, an arc around a human body? A halo played like a hoola hoop, as well as a symbol of divinity, rather than just worn as a crown?

October 30, 2016, Nogales Borderwall

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So, I’m in Nogales, AZ. Came down here to see the spot where José was shot across the border and killed by U.S. Customs Border police. A sad story, as so much of what regarding the United States’ border with Mexico is, particularly in light of the politics of the day, not least because an innocent boy lost his life and a family lost a son. To add to the family’s pain, it’s nearly impossible to prosecute an officer for an incident of this sort. In fact, to my knowledge, the prosecution, and the found guilty verdict, of the officer who shot José was a first in history. This took yearssss, however. Anyway, just being over by the wall was such a singularly surreal experience. I’d never been anywhere near the U.S.-Mexico border before, and yet there I was standing beneath the wall, peering up at it, and sighting along its length: a twenty-ish foot steel wall, slatted so that one can see through it. A monstrosity which dominates the town because it is so very hilly here, and so it rides those undulations of the hills so that no matter where you are you never lose sight of it. I can only imagine the feelings of the residents on either side of this… thing. I can ONLY imagine, and perhaps my imagination differs from reality. Do they feel like caged rats, subjects in someone’s science experiment? A remarkably sentient tropical fish swimming back and forth along the glass of an aquarium?

This is just the silliest thing in the world to me, that we create these barriers around each other, because, really, we’re all humans. We’re all the same people, essentially. And when one travels over land, either by bicycle or by car, you see that the land continues, and animal and plant life continues, and it all bleeds and blends together, and fluctuates and changes with climate zones, terrain, soil types, etc. And the fact that we create these borders… I mean the idea of countries is utterly ridiculous. Yes, culturally we might be different, but again, that’s something to be shared, and there’s some of that going on, but at the same time the idea of sticking a huge wall up, like that clown Trump insists, is utterly insane (particularly because there already exist walls along this border where it’s been deemed necessary). That money could go towards countless more beneficial social/industrial/environmental projects rather than trying to divide us further as human beings.

October 29, 2016, Nearing Algodones Dunes

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Just passed a citrus grove a bit back. Lemon trees or orange trees, some date palms around: this lone green spot in a landscape of tan, brown, sand, taupe. How queer and lush and so removed from its environment it seems.

This is what humans do when they feel foreign to the land, the environment in which they find themselves; they transform it into a place that is familiar and comfortable to them, hospitable to their needs, instead of appreciating, respecting it for what it is. In effect a judgement is made, and that judgment is usually that the land has no value, because we all want things that produce for us, and if the land doesn’t do that, well, we can’t for some reason see that the value of the land is in its uniqueness, that it is valuable simply as it is because IT IS, and so by claiming that it has no inherent value we are actually devaluing the very real value that it does have in being what it is in order that we may turn it into a machine, basically, that churns out things that we say are valuable (namely goods to be sold for cash, because in the world of humans very little is more valuable than money).

Coming up on the Algodones dunes now. The name implying what it is: a vast tract of sand…. Just sand. Mounds and mounds that go on for such great distances. I can see them from this hill I am driving along. It’s a beach that stretches out into nothing but more beach rolling, rolling along like great ocean swells. It’s, it’s an incredible sight. Mountain peaks in the distance. It does remind me a bit of Great Sand Dunes in Colorado, but I think this is on a vaster scale, though the mountains aren’t nearly so terrific and awe-inspiring.

Sort of a martian landscape, but up ahead it looks like there is a convoy of RV’s camped out in the desert. A common thing for retirees to come down and escape the cold winters, but I could be wrong. I can’t exactly tell what these are from here as its a good distance.

They’re trailers. Part of these dunes are used as a recreational area. The highway splits the area into two parts, left is the wilderness which I’ll be able to access further down, and to the right is the recreational area. Lots of people with ATV’s, dune buggies, lifted pickup trucks, etc. tearing around out there. It’s basically one big party, especially along the highway where everyone is camped out. There’s a party going on out in the desert too. Just a different kind of party. One fueled by adrenaline and gasoline. It’s not what I came for, but I’m interested….