WASH YOUR FEET
At my current assignment there is a men’s room that is used by all types of men to do the same exact thing. We all pull down our pants and express ourselves, depositing the past day’s breakfast, lunch and dinner, now digested, in the porcelain pond.
Each of us humans is different, processing our food differently and leaving our waste in unique ways. There is this mystery shitter in this place where I work who leaves such a toxic stench after he expels, that it rides the air like music shot out of a BOSE speaker and enters the nostrils of every employee within a hundred yards.
Layered on top of this hideous waft is a layer of Right Guard fragrance. The combination of these two odors together is enough to water the eyes and leave such an impression in one’s nostrils that it will repeat in your nose like that of the last song you hear in your ears… immediately upon departing from the car radio. It just keeps repeating in your mind like the smell of an overheard song.
Yesterday while being victimized by this gaseous gag I wondered why those two smells were being paired up like a steak and Cabernet. And then it hit me. Whoever was setting free from his ass this flock of wet ravens, was trying to be considerate by spraying deodorant afterwards. Not to control his own sweat but to control the odor. To de-odor the putrid perfume from the premises.
Once I realized this twisted paradigm, the whole world shifted in perspective. It helped me to understand the strange and unexplainable found in the photos I collected this past weekend. Like when I first shot this cow bathing in a fluorescent green pool, I wondered why, but my brain could go no further.
Now being a survivor of the toxic shock caused by my local john, I see the world differently. What should have represented a room of relief became the membrane of Post Traumatic Stress that I passed through leaving me affected. Someone using deodorant to de-odor the bathroom seemed to bend my mind and my view.
This cow was not just simply standing in the water for no reason. It was suddenly obvious to me that it was washing its feet before walking out to the pasture that it would eventually eat from. Maybe in the barn it was standing in its own poo. And all she wanted to do was clean herself off before trudging around in the field of her dinner plate.
Soon after leaving the cow’s restaurant pasture, I came upon a railroad crossing. I stopped in the middle of the track and marveled at the painted perspective and the cliché vanishing point. I wondered if in the distance there was an old-time locomotive pumping white steam into the air or if it was just a cloud that had decided to settle down into a point.
After staring a while, the white puff in the middle was no longer the focus and the bushes of black smoke on either side of it became my curious wonder. Then my visual mantra distorted to lose track completely, leaving just a giant capital “A” in the center of my view.
I continued down the road and came upon another field with cattle pulling hay from a cart. As soon as I pulled over, the cow popped her head off her straw sandwich and walked over to greet me. She had the prettiest alien eyes and the strangest orange ears.
Her perfectly bald domed head and sequined nose made up with black lips, drew me in, as I found her very beautiful in a lonely farm boy sort of way…till she turned and I noticed her hump.
Her partner, the bull, resented me admiring his mate and came over to make it clear that she was his. He obviously was some kind of artist or musician for why else would he have chosen to pierce his nose. I saw him as being a well endowed obese bull at one time and then got it together to be more appealing to the ladies.
He then slimmed down, got pierced and hung around with a dangerous crowd to add to his lure. Only there was nothing he could do about the stretched skin from his overweight period; it just hung on him like a leather jacket that was 3 sizes too large.
I wondered if his Rudolph Red Nose calf-making equipment, was his natural color or if he got it tattooed that color to make a statement of some kind. Maybe he was a famous athletic animal and the red tattoo was part of an endorsement deal with the energy drink manufacturer Red Bull.
Further down the road, I came to another grassy clearing where a white mare was practicing her poses. She saw me and shook her head in that patented snorting way. She did the front hoof lift then dig pose and then like an oily body-builder shimmering in photographer’s flashes, she struck the classic nostril-flared-tail-whip-lean-into-the-grass pose.
A few right turns, a few left turns and a few u-turns later, I found myself driving past a mysterious Abbey in the middle of nowhere. My head hurt as it tried to put me in some desert south-west Mexican village in order to see this structure. But I knew I was in nowhere Florida.
It was so clean and Spanish and screamed Monastery. I stood and stared as my hyper-focus examined the arches and symmetry of it all. Three arches in the bell tower straddled by crosses, led me down the center of the tower to the rest of the arches. Then the arches took on a strange sort of phallic profile to me.
I wondered if these architects were indeed frustrated celibate monks either obsessed or oblivious to the obvious mushroom capped column form. On the interior, lamps dangling between the legs of the arches that took on the impression of testicular chandeliers and I wondered if the hot sun was making my brain misfire.
I left that monastic place of pew and sought a cool breeze by some open spaces. I eventually found myself at the foot of a huge bridge where a strange tribe of villagers were also washing their feet. I wondered if they too would be walking around in their own field of dinner till I saw all the poles sticking out of the water.
This was obviously a pole farm and they had just begun planting a new crop of rods.
I left the pole farm and crossed a bridge and noticed there was some activity going on underneath. So I exited the road and tried to find my way around, down and under. Located in the upside down, I came to a strange park where odd-looking people were trying to jump on top of miniature flying surf boards that had wheels on them.
I watched for a while as the flying boards pushed off the ground like how repelling magnets push away from each other. And as those boards hovered and flew, all shapes and sizes of people continued to try to jump on them. An occasional bicycle would float off the ground as well drawing riders to attempt to mount it in mid-flight.
I got lucky grabbed a few shots and saw that the sun was starting to set and knew my day’s adventure would soon come to a close. I headed to the beach to watch the horizon pull itself up to climb onto the bottom of the bright light that seemed to always try to escape.
The water kept changing shape to resemble the clouds and then the clouds started changing shape to mimic the water as if I was watching some type of bizarre visual echo of nature.
And just as the foamy white crests of black satin waves churned to form puffy shapes identical to the cotton clouds above, I turned to see more people soaking their feet in the water. I thought of the cow washing her feet before she stepped onto her grassy rug restaurant and realized I had not eaten all day.
It was time to end my day, go home, wash my feet and have some dinner.
Barry Stein's Blog 
Great shots! I really like the first one.
Thanks Amy. Yeah… that first one caught my eye for no apparent reason. Just odd the way she was bathing out there in the green I suppose.
My favorite is the photo of cloudy sky and distant beach, with the seagull rising in the upper right corner. As always, your photographs depict everyday life… what might be considered common or not so outstanding, can be fascinating when frozen in time. Lovely post.
Thanks LittleSunDog 😉 Your pictures are so crisp and beautiful and full of people and nature… your kind compliment to me carries big weight!
“Once I realized this twisted paradigm, the whole world shifted in perspective. It helped me to understand the strange and unexplainable found in the photos I collected this past weekend.”
Now THAT’S making lemonade from lemons. 🙂
Very nice collection of images.
Thanks Kerry. You should have seen the previous three drafts that made far less lemonade. Thanks for your kind words and glad you like the images. It means a lot from one shooter to another.
Very nice Barry! Lovely photos. Nice narration. Jeannette
Thanks Jeanette!!!