Category: Ecstasis

by jad

#Route101: Reedsport / North Bend / Mapleton

We stopped here on our way to Portland on December 30, purely to take that photo in the last slide, but ended up leaving with some mini cakes and a big ol’ jar of blackberry High Country Honey from Lakeside, OR. It was a little sad to see all these shuttered and vacant stores lining both sides of main street, sandwiched between hokey MAGA wood art and a cute little “bakery & coffee shop” that didn’t sell coffee. It felt like a poetic aperçu of this place. x This was where we spent most of the morning of New Year’s … Continue reading “#Route101: Reedsport / North Bend / Mapleton” →

by jad

#Route101: Olympia / PDX / Lebanon

Olympia was a pit stop and packed lunch break at the start of our #Route101 road trip. This was my second time here but my first time passing through downtown; we’d only visited the state capitol area last time. I think it was just as grey and dreary then too. These were taken on the same #FujifilmSuperia400 roll I took with me to Bellingham on Thanksgiving break, but for some reason my #NikonN60 auto-wound it after only two shots. I got a film picker to salvage it later and you can see the accidental double-exposure in the last two slides from when it didn’t quite line … Continue reading “#Route101: Olympia / PDX / Lebanon” →

by jad

Old New Year

Today is #OldNewYear‘s Eve & #FridayThe13th, so it makes *perfect sense* to get my scans back from the lab this afternoon and post my NYE photos right now, right? Καλη Χρονια Να Εχουμε! x I had a weird day today in a first it was spooky, then it was cute kinda way. Spooky and cute and random like these shots from our NYE in Portland. x A couple more from our unorthodox New Year’s Eve on this Orthodox New Year’s Eve, featuring @xibling and a few random scanner misfires. Щасливого Нового року! x

by jad

#Route101: Eureka, CA to Portland, OR

More photos from my phone of our #Route101 road trip, before I develop my rolls of film. These sum up #EurekaCA to #PortlandOR: 1. Mural in Eureka, CA. I’d like to think that this is the California bear at his government job being a flag. 2. In-N-Out Burger in Eureka where I asked a server “how was the storm for ya” and he gave me a bumper sticker. 3. Mural in Napa, CA. I had the best shrimp and grits here. 4. Mural of SF at a gas station/burger stand in Hopland, CA. This was a bathroom break. 5. Our motel in Coos Bay, OR, … Continue reading “#Route101: Eureka, CA to Portland, OR” →

by jad

#Route101: Olympia, WA to Shelter Cove, WA

I shot four rolls of film on our #Route101 road trip and probably won’t get a chance to drop them off to be developed before Friday, which is fine, as that’s the 12th day of Christmas. But I’m expecting a post-holiday crunch so the scans might not even be ready for weeks… So in the meantime, here are more shots off my phone, summing up the journey from #OlympiaWA to #ShelterCoveCA: 1. Shipping container at Northpoint, Port of Olympia. We ended up here by mistake. 2. Storefront in Lebanon, OR. This town is a lot cuter than I’d expected. 3. Coke machine at our motel … Continue reading “#Route101: Olympia, WA to Shelter Cove, WA” →

by jad

#Route101: PDX-SF-Eureka

Dearest, I am writing to you from #EurekaCA after Christine heroically drove us through here, from Seattle to San Francisco, and back again, on #Route101. It has been a doozy. I’ll have more to say about it all in subsequent missives to you, good friend, but in the meantime, here are some unedited, straight out of the camera digital shots I took along the way on our first time down the coast, using that #HolgaLens I’m loving so much. Oo yeah, Californi-yay. x x One of the more memorable stops along the way was Shelter Cove. We knew it had a brewery that claimed to … Continue reading “#Route101: PDX-SF-Eureka” →

by jad

#AdventWord 2022: Christine

// Every year for many years, I took part in an Instagram ritual called #AdventWord, first on an old account, then here—every year except the last, when I just couldn’t; the very idea of ritual exhausted me. // A few weeks ago, I checked in with myself to see if anything had changed. Things had. I wanted to mark the season again, but only if I could do it with others. So that’s what I’ll be doing this year; not every day – just when it feels right. I hope it feels right for you too. // Today’s word is WALK. … Continue reading “#AdventWord 2022: Christine” →

by jad

A Fire is Lit: Concert Photography

This was my first time attempting to take anything more than smartphone snaps at a concert, and it turned out to be a lot of fun. Bar House wasn’t what I expected. It’s a great space but a little difficult to navigate with a chunky camera. I found it almost impossible to capture the frenetic energy from my cramped vantage point, so I’d assumed that most of my shots would have to be scrubbed off my SD card at the end of the night. But when I scrolled through them later, sitting by Fremont’s Lenin statue, I realized that much … Continue reading “A Fire is Lit: Concert Photography” →

by jad

An Alright Journey

‎الى اين‎بين النهرين‎بين سطرين‎لا يهم و نمشي ‎الى متى‎سار الفتى‎اين اتى‎لا يهم و نمشي x his is Christine holding a Polaroid we took earlier, outside the USCIS building where I got quizzed on civics, could not recall my social security number, and renounced all loyalty and fidelity to any prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, except that of these United States, so help me God. I like to think of it as an ad hoc aura photo of my total ontological reconstitution in this civil rite of baptism. Blessed be. It was an expedited oathtaking ceremony to get through the backlog of … Continue reading “An Alright Journey” →

by jad

Dog Days/Dead Media

Today has been the wildest day for technology, with copiers falling apart, messages not going through, PDFs mysteriously rendering darker, and emails landing in spam mid-thread; so if Mercury isn’t in retrograde, it really, really ought to be. I even posted this before I was ready. Sigh. Astrology’s connection to my “style” has come up a couple of times in the past few of days; one friend zeroed in on my Aquarian bent (“a bit cerebral in your aesthetics. edgy, understated and clean. futuristic”) while another noted the broadly #crabcore vibe (“Cancer Mercury explains your posts, your memory for so much like … Continue reading “Dog Days/Dead Media” →