Back to the future June 17, 2013
A year has passed since the most dramatic events of 2012,
one of which was a trip I took to Woodstock and what I posted on my blog when I
got back.
The tension a year ago was also tied to my posting of a photo
she sent me when she was perched on her roof top.
Both photos so enraged her she even called me demanding I remove
them.
The roof top photo has an
interesting history because she actually sent it to my phone weeks, maybe even
a month, prior to that night she took to the roof top after I stupidly left her
at the bar in Hometown.
Like the photo she sent me with
her “friends,” the roof top photo was too dark for me to make out until I
downloaded it later and lightened it, startled to find her face and the five floor
drop to the street behind her.
I had forgotten all about the
photo until the day after she freaked out over the bar incident and added it to
a poem I posted urging her not to consider leaping off the roof.
She went ape shit and demanded I
remove the image, and later posted a poem of her own about intellectual
property.
As I said earlier, the time
between when she sent me the photo and when she freaked out was about a month,
making me wonder later just how many times prior to the night I left her at the
bar she had sought refuge on that roof, and to whom she initially meant to send
the photo a month earlier when she accidentally sent it to me.
She could not have meat our
temporary boss, unless she had focused on him much sooner than I thought.
More than a year later, the reason
for her sending me the photo when she did remain an unsolved mystery, perhaps if
meant for me, serving as some kind of plea for help, even when her poetry rejected
it.
Yet posting it when I did fed into
her wrath and her conclusion that I was stealing pieces of her past, intellectual
property theft.
The second photo had an equally
curious history because it came about from my yearly trip to Woodstock where my
poet friend resided for several years, and where she managed to trickle up to
management of a popular eatery there.
Normally, I made the trip there in
August – around the annual anniversary of the famous concert by that name.
Although the concert had not taken place in Woodstock village, we knew there
would be a musical celebration none of the less, and tried to catch them. This
was a ritual that we maintained since the early 1990s. And as usual, I took a
significant number of photographs and videos, capturing every small detail I
could, fearing something might not be there the next time I came, such as
things like the long-gone Tinker Street Café.
When we arrived, we paused at the
community center, where one of the vendors pulled me aside and informed me that
I “Walked with God,” something I later incorporated into a poem and posted it
along with a number of photos I had taken – among which was the sign for the restaurant
she previously worked at.
Admittedly, it was a provocative
act.
I didn’t go into the restaurant or
even talk to anybody who worked there. I hadn’t gone to Woodstock on account of
her at all, yet knew when I posted that one particular picture, it would piss
her off.
I didn’t know how pissed off she
would get until later when she called screaming for me to remove the photo,
which I eventually did, damage already done, having escalated our conflict to a
new disturbing height, and for which she would never forgive me.
The combination of my posting
these two photos, leaving her at the bar, and talking about her to our
temporary boss, created a narrative of negativity I could never make amends for
regardless of how hard I tried. The icing on the cake came a month later when I
foolishly did the most idiotic thing possible when I texted her wishing her a
happy birthday.
The Woodstock part of all this
contains an even stranger irony in that I had paid Woodstock a visit on the 40th
anniversary of the concert where I took the usual photos and videos and later
posted a video putting together music audio with images from around the
village.
The irony is that she lived there
at the time. While the video did not include any place she worked (how could I,
I hadn’t even met her at the time), but I used shots from the street near her
restaurant, and in some clips, there are women who strongly resemble her,
passing the village square where the musicians played.
God only knows what she might have
thought if I had posted this video on my blog last year. Would she have accused
me of pulling a “Back to the Future,” somehow managing to travel back in time
to catch her in the act back then.
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