Day four, only not

I am done digitizing for the night.

My gift to Mom, and if they want it, the rest of the family, is the entirety of the family album. Every photo we have taken as a family or individuals, from 1950 to the present, reconstructed, refined, corrected, and placed in an archival album. The upside? All the photos on disk, in DVR format, and also stored in a glossy archival quality album that replaces roughly three feet of photo album space on the families' bookshelf. And mine, of course.

The downside? All the tricks and tweaks I learned as a graphic restorer makes this thing come out to about ten minutes per photo, on average. Some of the older ones (and many of the older color ones, color is the worst) take upwards of an hour or more to tweak and make decent. I decided not to remove all the scratches, unless they appeared on the subjects or were unduly distracting. I am restoring the past to acceptable condition, not trying to make it pristine.

Anyhow, I have put several dozen hours behind me thus far, and have about ten times more to go. And Sunday is the deadline for standard shipping.

For this, I have neglected family and friends, online activities, pets, and dinner. But it is worth it. Every minute. Because I am saving three generations' worth of memories. Stuff that I imagine a lot of people have forgotten. I did something similar for Mom and her own history last year, but I was lucky. Those were all black and white, which is far more forgiving than color. But it is a labor of love, and sadly, with my financial situation, love and the associated labors are all I can feasibly give this year.

But looking back at the past, at the birthday parties and the moments at the beach, I sometimes get overwhelmed by the astonishing past. Not just mine, but everyones. I look at the photo of my family when I was born. My dad was my age. The age I am now. And yet... and yet he looks so old, so grounded, so....Dad-like. Was that the way it was back then? The arrow shirts, the Brylcreem hair, the seriousness? Hard for me to even wrap my head around that.

And Mom, who I adore. I have reconstructed seven or eight high school portraits of her as a teacher. And created a skin tone where there was none, made teeth a shade or three whiter (nicotene!) and brought her lipstick down to a manageable level.

I wonder how many of these alterations I make every day with my own memories. Make my exes seem more poingnant, make me wonder what I was thinking to let someone go, airbrush out the distracting speckles and discolorations which happen with time. Create a pristine version of events, of people. And in our best moments, I am sure they more than loved up to those recreations. White teeth, great hair, no flaws, charismatic personalities. Moments that make any sane person wonder why these people are no longer in my life.

Sometimes I do that. And sometimes I suffer for it, because I do not like to remember the other side, the sad side, the ugly side, the awful stuff that tore us apart.

When recreating photos of my family and friends, I create the best possible version of each person, in each photograph. Which is okay in a photo album. But dangerous, deadly even, when applied to our breathing past.

I do not like to dwell on slights. I do not like to think about, or even fully remember the bad stuff. But I think it might be important to remember that. Not to allow it to fester. Just to remind myself that my decisions were not totally without merit. I loved my ex enough to consider making him my world. And, of course, I did for a long time. But that did. Funny the time we spend on things, on people, the effort we put in, only to find out it was not only unappreciated, but at the end of the day, it was not even desired. But we often do it anyway, for no other reason except that it does give us pleasure to do good things, to do important things. For their own sake.

Someone should do this. I, therefore, am. Someone should blog about HIV and AIDS from a personal standpoint, instead of simply reviewing political and social issues easily found all over the internet. Someone should care enough to take a piece of their heart, expose it for the world, and take his or her lumps for doing so.

I know my experiences with HIV and AIDS are quickly becoming anachronistic with the new bevvy of treatment options and slow but sure societal acceptance. So I write from that standpoint, if for no other reason, than to digitize the photographs of this time, this person, in this place. People like myself are living longer, hell, living PERIOD thanks to the same breakthroughs that are making us obsolete.

I am archiving photos that might only be of interest to my mom and myself, and perhaps my brother. But that alone is worth the effort. I am archiving my experiences as a person with AIDS even though recently diagnosed persons in the developed world might never share them. And I am becoming okay with that. Because people who lived through the nastiness and horror have an obligation to tell the stories, even to deaf ears.

Even when we become irritants to people whose mission is to gloss over the potential realities of having a chronic, manageable disease. Even when we surpass those we respect and admire as teachers, and become resented and disenfranchised. Even when few people listen, and fewer people relate, and no one seems to care. It's important to tell the stories, to share the experiences, to bring people, for a moment, into a world different from their own.

Thats what these photographs I am scanning do for me. That's what my blogging does for me. I have done a lot here, and learned a lot here. Perhaps all I can. This exile, and the angry messages I received, have given me cause to think. And I have not been idle during that time.

When I finish scanning in these photos of my family, and make them into a book, there may not be another book to follow. We have, as a family, all but stopped taking pictures. And that time, that importance, might be over. And that is okay, sort of. Because things do change. People change. They grow, they die, they evolve and move. Even when they do not wish it to be so.

I notice that in the last few months, I have been blogging a lot about unwanted change, inevitable losses and my frustration with not being able to stop these things from happening. And I can't say with any certainty that I am done with that frustration. But I am slowly learning to roll with it, to a degree. To accept painful truths, and become the person I need to become in order to continue the search for happiness.

In some cases it is necessary to wail, to cry, to gnash teeth, to cry out against injustice and the perversion of things I thought sacrosanct. It is important to cry myself to sleep sometimes when I discover that people I thought liked me, well didn't. And don't. When illusions shatter, they leave shards that pierce the skin, work themselves underneath, and, goddamnit, hurt.

But there comes a time when the crying, and the wailing, and the wringing of hands no longer proves cathartic. Or the cathartic moments pass, and the tears dry, and We, I, realize it is might simply be time to go on, go forward, spend my energies where I am truly and well loved and respected, instead of trying to sell myself to people who simply aren't in the market for what I have to offer.

But its important to remember. To keep the photographs in my head. To be proud, if wistful, about the good that has come. And, someday, to find true perspective that can only be found miles after the fact.

I am not, as I blogged earlier, an arctic explorer lost in the wilderness after all.

I am someone who is free, with all the scary that freedom entails. I just needed that push to realize it.

Out of the nest, into the wind.