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The Great John Lurie



Asher this morning, “I woke up at 5AM blinked, then it was 6:45. How did that happen?”

I have been having to fill out way too many forms with my birthdate trying to get a vaccine. Scrolling...scrolling back through months and years to July 10, 1955. While I have always tried to focus on each day I am living, it just seems like so very many days were just here and gone. How did THAT happen?

Stephie went back to school in person today. The boys are supposed to go back in two weeks. That whole wonderful time together here at the house is ending. Days filled with three classes going at once. Three meals juggled. Elaborate breakfast bowls. Lots of quesadillas. A crazy amount of chicken in all forms. Oat Milk and Dairy milk cartons sitting next to each other. Lots of lemons. Periods of coffee and periods of tea. Months of green now months of gray. Still, the energy was always there. Asher up early. Stephie before him. I am trying to write down notes while in the shower. Jackson eating sunflower seeds. Kind of gross. Incredibly small amount of frustration considering all the doors that were closed to keep the boogie man out.

School is starting back in person even though nothing has changed. Our county is still considered high risk. There is no testing or vaccines for the teachers. If most kids (and many adults) are asymptomatic, there is no way to know if anyone is sick or not. How will they trace if a family is infected by someone at the school or at the grocery store if you can’t prove it?

I was driving Jackson and a friend the other night. His friend in the backseat said, “If the choice is doing zoom classes from home with my shirt off, or doing zoom classes in school with my shirt on….I am staying home.” They are not yet sure how much live teaching there will be at school when the boys return. The school is trying to figure that out. In the meantime the guy who runs youth baseball is calling for my credit card.

I have been thinking about how fear handicaps us when it needs to motivate us. Sometimes for a kid, the idea of breaking an egg is like stepping up to the plate against a really good pitcher. We have broken many eggs the past months. Cooking takes confidence. Especially flipping the eggs.

I love John Lurie’s new HBO show, “Painting With John”. It is wonderfully strange and almost perfect for the times. It is short and another episode gets released every Friday night. His music is the soundtrack, which I love. His paintings are a mystery I want to own. Lurie’s days are so simple, yet they feel like perfect dreams he allows to play out on an island they don’t identify. It is kind of like the news of the election results that were dreamt up. Except one is art and the other is bullshit. He announced that he actually rehearses his story telling - which I love even more. I like rehearsing and revising as much as I love improvisation.

This my picture of John Lurie in New York. I love this one. I am glad I didn’t know much about the people who I would later idolize when I photographed them. If I knew all about John Lurie when I took this picture I couldn’t have broken the egg.

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