Change Is Good

or How did I get here?

Today, for the first time since my divorce in 1996, I wished my ex-wife a happy birthday. By text, but still.

It's weird, I guess that that has been the case, but divorce is a pretty shitty experience to go through, regardless of the fifty percent that I contributed to the shittiness of the relationship, which I didn't recognize as shitty at the time because I didn't really give it that much thought.

Maybe shitty isn't really the word for it—for her, yeah, since she's the one who filed—at least I didn't see it that way. I mean I see now what a shitty husband I was—in ways that didn't involve cheating, physical or verbal abuse, getting drunk every night, neglecting the kids... you know the typical metrics by which a shitty marriage is determined as such. No, it was my lack of emotional presence; it was my all-consuming desire to not fail at the job I was failing at that kept me away from home more hours than I care to admit. I went in early, came home late, and often went in late at night for a couple more hours. I was a supervisor and I sucked at supervising, so I did a shitload of my staff's work because for the most part, they didn't care one way or the other if it got done. Our clients' work (often research scientists) required timely delivery. Let me add here, though, that it wasn't all of the people who worked for me.

To be fair, I never instilled in my staff the importance of meeting deadlines. But in my own defense, at what point was that my responsibility? How do thirty-year-old people not get that when something is scheduled to be done by a certain time, you plan your day around that? It was something I could never wrap my head around because every job I'd had in photography/graphics/advertising had been very team-oriented. Everyone understood what had to be done and did it. Anyway, that was where my head was at for the last almost-eleven years of my marriage.

You'd think, of course, that my work would be a subject for discussion between us, but no, my mind set was "why should I burden her with this after her long day with the kids?" It was cyclical in that way, I suppose, since the more I clung onto that rationale for not talking about my problems, the more it became a problem that I wasn't talking about it.

I'm typically not the type to blame his parents for the way I acted within my marriage, but neither can I ignore the fact that I never heard my parents discuss stuff, whether marriage related or really anything. There probably is a certain amount of modeling from our parents that comes into play. I failed to rise above it, though. Not long after my divorce, after I'd moved into my apartment, I was on the phone with my mom. My older brother had left his wife after twenty-five years of marriage, and my younger brother had been kicked out of his house by his wife because she'd found out he'd been screwing around with someone. In possibly the only time Mom had displayed vulnerability in the years I'd known her, she said something to the effect of, "I should have shown more love to you kids." It was a bit of a shocker really, because as best as I can recall she had never once said, "I love you" to any of us. (Years later, she did.) Mom didn't kiss us before bedtime... I don't recall getting hugs from her. Anyway, my response to her was something like "Mom, you did the best you could. We're (referring to me and my brothers) all adults and we have to live with the decisions we've made in our lives."

It probably didn't help alleviate her Catholic-fed guilt much, but it most certainly was the truth.

It's kind of weird how the thought of wishing my ex-wife happy birthday brought all this out, but it just goes to show how so much of what we do and say and don't do and don't say are related.

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Old Is New

I'm not including a photo with this post, although I should have looked for something just to dress it up a bit, but all of a sudden, after yesterday's post, I have this urge to write stuff here on this old blog (maybe I should change the name again to This Old Blog?) while letting go of my Medium and Substack pages. No one reads anything I write anyway, so what's the difference where I write?

Just now, I went to my Soundcloud page and deleted that account. I hope I have copies of the songs on a drive somewhere. I've just been in this frame of mind lately to start reducing my internet presence. I've already begun to unsubscribe to many of the marketing emails I get—not that I actually ever wanted to receive them in the first place—since I tend to delete them without looking at them anyway. I can't believe how fucking many I get! On many, I've gone to the website of origin and deleted my account.It suckes that they still have my email to be shared and or stolen by others, but I do feel it helps. A little.

I've got a couple of pages at Facebook... one is my photography page, and another is dedicated to the essays and "Thoughts at Large" of Sydney J. Harris, possibly the person who is most responsible for my interest in writing in the first place. I've let that page go a long time without updates, but maybe if I can get myself into some kind of habit, I can maintain it because I really think more people should know about him and the way he thinks, er... thought. Thanks to Google Lens, it's easier to transcribe his writing, which is something that has been a time suck for me, so perhaps I can systematically attack his essays and not—as I have done in the past—select something that is appropriate to the events of the day, week, or month.

I think I feel a plan coming along.

Mark Zuckerberg still sucks, though.

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Stagnancy, Change, Renewal

Union Station, Portland ©2024 Patrick T. Power.

This might be only a temporary thing, but I'm returning to my original blog to write this. Memories from over twenty years ago surfaced and it led me back here. I was surprised to find though, that my earliest post was from 2000, and that it was the only post from that year. From the tone of it, one might think that there had been previous posts, but apparently not. Anyway, in addition to the three blogs related to my parents' history I maintain, I've been posting personal stuff at Medium and Substack. I guess I can't help hopping on the next-best-thing bandwagon.

The photograph I've included here was taken on the 22nd of March 2023. I was taking my son back to Michigan via Amtrak and due to having missed our connecting train in Portland the previous evening by about twenty minutes, Amtrak put us up for the night. Our train for Chicago didn't leave until late afternoon of the 22nd, so I took a stroll in the morning to take some photographs. Union Station is one of the more beautiful train stations I've seen in the country, so I spent a fair amount of time photographing it inside and out.

I have been posting photographs at Instagram for quite some time now. I was enthralled with it at first, before Facebook purchased it. I rather liked the Hipstamatic-created images that many people were posting, and I, not having an iPhone (for which Hipstamatic was created), was stuck with lesser Hipstamatic-ish applications. Still, I had fun with it, and I enjoyed what others were posting. The Facebook/Meta takeover ruined it, of course. I don't know how much Facebook/Meta actually had to do with what Instagram became— namely THE place that other photographers posted their professional portfolios (versus or in addition to, I suppose, their own websites), where celebrities shared their publicity imagery, and where regular people tried to gain massive popularity—but the vibe most definitely changed for me. It seemed as if Instagram had merely become the place to be discovered.

Of course, that's not me. It's not my mindset. I just wanted to post photographs of the things throughout the course of my days, usually taken during my daily walks around the city. For me, it was about sharing. For the last five years, I think, I've taken and posted at least one photograph a day on Instagram, with perhaps a day or two that I somehow missed in that span. I used to tag my photos thinking, OK, yeah, maybe it might lead to getting more eyeballs and therefore more work opportunities if those same eyeballs decided to check out my website, but nah... it mostly led to spammers posting their profile links. I have tagged my projects, such as my Prisma-a-day project in 2020, mostly as a way of finding things for later reference, but I've even cut that out this year.

During my time on Instagram, I've allowed my Flickr photostream (do people still refer to them as photostreams?) to stagnate, despite that I pay for my Pro Flickr account. Last year, I tried to maintain the photo-a-day thing at both Instagram and Flickr, but couldn't keep up. As I mentioned, the above photograph was taken on 22 March, so that means that I made it eighty-one days into the year—not even three full months!

At some point in the last few months, though, as I've scrolled through Instagram, I've decided that I no longer want to post or spend much time there. I've not decided yet if I won't ever post there again, but I'm of a mind as I type this that I won't. Just now, though, scrolling through my feed, I'm pleased with the photographs and the way that they look as a whole. I think that they come together pretty nicely. I like that I stuck with the square format from day one (which was the only way to post in the early days); I like that I did a whole year of black-and-white photographs; I like that I did a whole year—time-consuming though it was—of creating Prisma-created images. Now, though, I want to have as little to do with that asshole Zuckerberg as possible. Yes, I'll maintain my Facebook account, mainly for the groups that I maintain there, but also for the connection it provides with a sizeable number of friends.

Despite that it's not and never will be what it once it once was, I'm heading back to Flickr to share my photographs. I might try to catch up my 2023 and 2024 one-a-day projects between now and the end of this year, but because of my change of phones a couple of times and losing track of where I've archived everything (thanks to a couple of major moves of files in the last couple of years), it could take forever.

I'm not sure what I'll do with regard to my blogging. It seems counterproductive to have three platforms for my personal writing. Maybe I'll take all of the essays from the other sites and re-post them here. I'd already re-posted a number of Facebook Notes (remember those?) at Medium... perhaps it won't be so difficult to re-post them yet another time.

My interest in writing has changed immensely since I christened this blog. So much of my time and energy was taken up wasted with writing about the presidency of George W. Bush. In fact, not too long ago, I spent a day or two deleting many of my political posts. I hope to make time for more of that. I've similarly spent wasted a lot of time screaming into the void on Twitter for the last ten years or more, ruining what was originally a wonderful experience. I deactivated that account recently and have moved to Bluesky, which has a similar vibe to early Twitter, but I don't want to repeat the Twitter experience there, especially having come to the realization that what I have to say isn't really all that important to anyone but myself. So I might end up backing away from that place as a matter of maintaining my mental health.

I've also changed the title of this blog since Voice Of Power was somewhat of a reference to the power of thought and communication in the political blogosphere (a term I've not heard in a while, come to think of it) while coincincidentally being a play on my name. It remains a play on my name but without the pretention.

So, as the saying goes, onward and upward. Or maybe in my case, just onward.

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