Burlingame

No mat­ter how impor­tant I make up my job is, there is always the num­ber cruncher who reduces it to the cold and low­est terms of dol­lars and hours and wid­gets and grub­bing and the taste in my mouth is of ashes. And then the other side of that truth is that some­one else could do my job. I am not nec­es­sar­ily what is impor­tant about “my” job. And, also, I am what is nec­es­sar­ily and won­der­fully impor­tant about my job. We can hold both of these three truths inside us at the same time. The ten­sion between them keeps them afloat. (Augusten Bur­roughs writes about the unend­ing pain of a child dying and the first time one laughs after that and how both those things are true and true and…ok.)
When I am drubbed by the unim­por­tance of my job, I walk out of the hotel in Burlingame and stand with a smok­ing man and wait for the smoke to cross my path, the acrid smell of it (and also kind of nice, I can’t deny it) swirling in eddies as the stream of wind finds it, and I stand there and the smoke comes past me and I make a pho­to­graph. Then I have made some­thing today. There was not this pho­to­graph and then I worked with my cam­era and we agreed on this moment. And I love that and inside me it set­tles the way a leaf set­tles in the water, drop­ping this way and that until it is really set­tled, in the bot­tom of me. And I exhale the breath I have been hold­ing all day at my impor­tant job.