Change

I once wrote in my journal how I thought that the only women who really mattered were those willing to have sex with me. I have since been proven wrong.

--Mitchell Hegman

Hong Kong, 1985



 

 

Today, I have posted two photographs that I took of Hong Kong in 1985 with my Minolta SLR film camera.

 

--Mitchell Hegman



A Woman

I’m not sure that I am reacting as most people might, following the death of their long-time spouse. Specifically, I refer to my thoughts about the opposite sex. In my case, women. I will further clarify by saying that my reaction is the lack of thoughts about women or sex. I have, incrementally, over the last three months, become less and less interested in women, sexually. I sometimes think you might set Angelina Jolie between me and my television, have her dancing seductively in a see-through negligee, and I would ask her to kindly step aside so I could flip to the Discovery Channel or the Food Network. Something is missing…and that something, though I never really try to define this in certain terms, is the woman I loved. For all these years I have invested all that I am, all that I have, in my wife. Now that she is gone, so is most of my desire.

This is an unexpected development. I expected that the absolute absence of my wife, the hole that she left when she vanished might drive me to, at a minimum, unfulfilled desire.

Not so.

The other day, for instance, I met a younger woman defined by a pair of large, surgically enhanced breasts. Big, fake boobs, if you prefer. Her breasts stood at forced attention below her chin, handily exposed in her low-cut top like two glossy bullets in the open magazine of a rifle. Not an unattractive woman by any means, she purposefully swung her breasts at me, tossed them to the side, pressed them out in front of every motion she conducted. A production, to be sure. While many men would have been hoping for a “wardrobe malfunction,” similar to the one that befell Janet Jackson at Super Bowl 38, I backed away, concerned that one of us might get hurt if she became overly animated. Mostly, I kept fixed on her eyes, which were deep brown, nearly the exact color of Coca-Cola, and far more interesting than the rest of her.

--Mitchell Hegman

Our House

Here is a picture I snapped of the house Uyen and I constructed below the sky. The photo was taken in 1993, two years after we finished. Again, the sky is my garden...

--Mitchell Hegman

A Lakeshore Chat

My friend Leo is at or near the age of eighty-four. This time of year, we sometimes bump into each other at the lakeshore and sit under the shade of his giant golden willow, watching as thin young people in shiny ski boats with lurid graphics swing skiers and tubers and boarders across the water in front of us. We often talk about politics and family and whatever weeds are pestering our property at a given time. The weed at present is what we call Chinese clover.

Funny how I regard Leo a close friend these days, especially when you consider he is actually the father of one of my best friends, and when you further consider that he frightened the hell out of me as a kid. He was big and often bearded and teased with a dry style that children never fully comprehend. Most alarming of all, he hung on the front door of his house a sign that read “Don’t Go Away Mad, Just Go Away.” Let me assure you, I only knocked on that door with great reluctance as a kid, always hoping that Leo would not answer. And then there is the time he volunteered to cut my hair and shaved my head bald as I squirmed in panic. My mother phoned a scathing protest his way following that. My mother, at the time, liked a new group of musicians, with longish hair, called The Beatles.

Yesterday, during the shimmering heat of late afternoon, we met at the shore and chatted as he sat on his four-wheeler, which he uses constantly due to hip and knee malfunction and pain. Eventually, the subject turned to animals—both pets and the wild turkeys we have been seeing recently. As a boat with thumping music sliced across the lake, generating waves that nearly rolled up onto the grass at my feet, Leo told me that something came up onto the porch of his house late the other night and sprayed urine on his front door. “I guess it could have been a feral cat or something,” he speculated.

“I don’t know, Leo,” I answered after some thought, “Might have been one of your relatives.”

--Mitchell Hegman

The Business of Ruin

Somewhere along the line, about ten years ago, I either bumped my head one morning or drank some tainted coffee—the end result of which instilled within me an urge to remote my way through the television cable channels and watch some of the early morning business programming. I have to admit, I really don’t understand business. I get a little—no, a lot—lost when the folks on the guest panels begin discoursing about “fiscal” policy versus “monetary” policy. When a wall-streeter talks about “playing the margins,” I typically envision someone playing shuffleboard on some sunny ship’s deck at sea. And, while I am certain shuffleboard is inappropriate in the business aspect, I am not interested enough to dig deeper for understanding. Also, I don’t know a damned thing about shuffleboard. Nonetheless, I have continued watching some of the business shows.

I am pretty sure that we have by this point established that some pretty big messes have been brewing in the financial world. The thing I find intriguing about financial and business troubles, though, is not the path that led us to them, not the structure of the particular troubles (as an example, the swath of upside-down mortgages hanging over us), and not even what may eventually solve the problems; I am fascinated by how many of the people on these business shows spend their days devising ways of carving profit from the points of collapse rather than finding a way to actually repair the problems. Often, the money-making schemes are completely beyond my understanding. If I cannot figure out shuffleboard, how will I tackle oil futures and any manner of speculation? The free markets and business formations are tricky beasts to slay and I am without a proper spear, intellectually speaking.

Still, I watch.

In the last half-dozen years, profit and failure have proven to be successfully conjoined twins. In one example, home foreclosures have ascended to all-time highs banking profits have similarly climbed. The banks are presently flush, thank you very much. This morning, as I watched another of the investment kings explaining where best to express profit in our wobbly world marketplaces, the jarring thought occurred to me that we are paving our long-term road to ruin with short-term success achieved by any means. But, since I really don’t grasp business, hopefully I am wrong.

--Mitchell Hegman

A Quote

I think that for today we will simply run with a quote from Albert Einstein that I really like:

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”