#5: Therapy and Kites

Ed says: "OK, picture explainer. Figure this one out. Past? Future? Or perhaps even the dark and distant present?!"

I accept your challenge, not that I have a choice under the brutal terms of our contract. Speaking of which, have you ever gone to therapy? Well, I have. Much of the so-called conversation was related to my uncomfortable relationship with my identity as an "artist," a term I am still loath to use self-referentially, considering its baggage and my inability to create anything anyone could consider as "art." I remarked that I had a strange sort of envy for the artist who had been given the gift of losing his parents at an early age, as he could then express himself without the constant mental image of his mother crying about her son's immoral and pathetic inner life hovering over his work. She replied that it might be helpful to think of my parents as dead. I started doing that, and had to double up on the therapy.

This picture was taken Thursday, July 30, 2009, at 12:55pm EST, in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Ed tried to trick me by rotating the photo 180 degrees, but when you flip it around it's obvious that this is a close-up of an Afghani kite festival in a cloudless sky. You can even see the strings. The small blurry blob near the bottom (top?) of the photo is either a dead paratrooper or the ghost of a paratrooper.