Time Is Some Form of Money
I have been photographing the small town I live in because I feel that my time here has come to an end – if not literally (yet), then for sure mentally. I don’t want to live here any longer. It’s not a terrible place – there could be a lot worse; yet there also could be a lot better. Photographing it has allowed me to create some sort of visual record. But it has also allowed me to channel my discontent with this overly privileged and often shockingly tone deaf place into pictures.
The photographs are opinions.
In the process of photographing I’ve been walking and driving around to locations where I think I can make pictures. Those locations aren’t necessarily places I have spent a lot of time in while living here. But I’ve been fascinated with many of them in one way or another.
When I moved here, there was an abandoned mental institution up on one of the hills. You’d drive up Route 66 (no, not that one), and there it was, on your left. From what I heard, it had been a very nasty place – much like many such institutions. There were stories about how at some stage, people who would require help had simply been released, following some changes in state laws. I never looked into it.
I don’t know when the shell of the building was torn down, but it eventually was. This being the US, they built some anonymous business building where the institution had been. Feel free to insert your own thoughts about that here.
A little further down the road from that location, there are the public gardens (I had a plot there for a year). There also is a nice area to walk. I’m not a big walker, but I went there a few times.
One day, I found a little marker that said that on the hill in question, patients from the institution had been buried. Mind you, it wasn’t an official cemetary. It was a burial ground with unmarked graves. The thought of people being locked up in some repulsive institution, only to then be buried the next hill over without even a grave marker (and, one must assume, much of a funeral) saddened me.
Yesterday, I drove up there again, thinking that maybe that office building would be a good picture. It wasn’t. Another building I thought would be a good picture wasn’t either (I’ll put it up on Instagram anyway). Walking around, I found something else, though. The back side of one building had clearly seen better days, and the harsh sun light made for good shadows. I took some pictures.
Back home, I looked up what that building was. It’s a state hospital. It looks like it was built in the 1950s. Clearly it is newer than the institution that would have been on the other side of the road. Were they at some stage connected? I’m not interested enough to look it up, given I’ve mentally already left.
I don’t approach life in the neoliberal fashion that has become so popular. You have seen the books and videos in which people tell you how you can be more productive or more efficient. I don’t mind being inefficient some of the time, because it allows me to be myself – instead of a cog in a larger machine.
The other day, I watched a video, in which someone explained why he didn’t read books any longer. To be honest, it was so absurd to me that it might have been a parody. I thought it was really funny. But I also know that these types of people are real, especially in the US. It’s the people who write books about being more efficient or productive, mostly by cutting everything out of your life that doesn’t have a real purpose. It’s the books you see with “New York Times Bestseller” stickers on them.
I like the moments when my mind doesn’t appear to have a purpose. I can feel it wandering even if often I don’t know where it’s going. I experienced such a moment yesterday. I have been working on a new book of writing. The process has so far been a bumpy ride, filled with a lot of doubt and some exhileration. My latest wave of depression over it arrived when I realized that I didn’t know how to end it. It’s not a book that needed an ending. But all books end somewhere – they can’t just stop on the final page. Yesterday, I found my ending. My mind found it, that is. I don’t know how it will play out, but my mind worked on it, while I was only conscious of the fact that it now had been settled. I felt good about it, and I still do.
If I tried to make a video about this I couldn’t. How would you explain to use your wandering mind as a creative tool? How’s this productive – other than that it simply is?
I do think about my time a little bit. I think about time being money when it comes to anything computer related: if the actual cost of an item translates into a lot of my own time saved, I will buy it (think: backup drives). This is mostly for time saved on doing things that I can’t stand doing. I’d never buy something to save time on doing something I enjoy.
I don’t enjoy working with computers any longer.
But there is another, somewhat related case where I’m thinking about my time. I noticed it the other day when I found a link to a video that explained how filmmakers can make movies with mirrors in which you don’t see the camera in the mirror. I clicked on it and found that the video was 13 minutes long. I didn’t watch it. I was curious about the trick. But I wasn’t curious enough to spend 13 minutes of my life on it. I think I would have invested three or four minutes. The same thing happened today with a video about someone working on some bonsai tree. Twenty two minutes. I didn’t watch it.
This is not to say that I mind spending time on finding out about the world. I’ll spend hours reading a book about death, mourning, and funerals in Japan. I’ll watch all kinds of other videos. But I think in each case, I somehow consider whether what is being offered is worth the amount of time necessary.
I suppose what this means is that curiosity itself is not a monolith. I’m curious about a lot of things. But I’m more curious about some things than about others. It’s strange how in the day and age of ubiquitous explainer videos this has now translated into my curiousity expressing itself as the length of a video I’m going to watch for some topic.
As always thank you for reading!
– Jörg