it used to be that taking pictures made me feel better. i’d hold a tiny little point and shoot in my hands and when i pushed the shutter release halfway down to focus, i could feel the tiny little motors spinning the lens, struggling to determine just what it was i wanted to focus on, even though it had no eyes. now, i can feel the nice, solid ka-chunk my camera makes when it flips up the mirror and smashes that big mechanical shutter over its sensor; people who take my camera for a spin compliment how good it feels. how comfortable that noise sounds. you hear that and you know the camera’s working hard. but everything looks just a little bit off to me. it’s like the picture where the focus isn’t quite right, where there’s a blurry foreground that hurts a little to look at, a horizon that isn’t just straight, but isn’t purposefully tilted, either. it’s like when you walk into someone else’s house and you look at their blinds and one of them is stuck. one of them flipped the wrong way, or got caught on the cables. you want to reach over and fix it, but your host is watching you, and it would be rude. it’s like seeing years of dust and dirt caked on the blinds because no one bothers to clean them. it’s a pain in the ass to clean them. yeah. that’s what this feels like.
