Walking through the Mission, it’s impossible to miss all the ass. It’s just booty, booty everywhere:

And for those who can’t fill out your jeanshorts, THERE IS HOPE FOR YOU, LADIES.

Of course, I find that a diet of thigh-sized burritos does the same trick without resorting to special ass-pantalóns:

He doesn’t ask for money, he asks for food.

I’m with my friend Sal* after an afternoon spent photographing buds and textures at the arboretum in Golden Gate Park. We’re heading into Safeway for onions and catfood. We tell the guy no, but when we get inside, we stop at the sandwich counter.

“I’ll go see what he wants,” I say.

Anything, he tells me. Whatever’s good. “What do you really want? Turkey? Roast beef?”

Roast Beef, it is, I tell Sal and then, while the sandwich is being made, I go back out to talk to the guy, take his picture. His name is Jelani and he’s from southern California.

“How do you like the cold up north?” I ask. He shakes his head and pulls the blanket he’s wearing around him tighter.

“I’m from the really southern part of the state. I’m not used to this shit.”

All the while, I’m snapping pictures, finding the focus point in one eye or the other, then taking the shot.

As we talk, another street dude walks past. “Charge her ten bucks,” he says.

“What’s that, man?” Jelani asks.

“Charge that lady ten bucks for pictures and you’ll eat.”

Jelani shakes his head. “She’s already feeding me, but thank you, brother.”

I ask how he likes San Francisco and he tells me he wishes he’d brought his drum with him. “That’s the one good thing about this city,” he says. “You can get in on some really great drum circles.” He was traveling with a friend and they’d stopped at that friend’s mom’s place somewhere south of the city. He’d left his drum there. “To let her know we’d be coming back,” he says sadly.

“And now you can’t go back?”

“My friend died. Right over in that park,” he says, pointing the block over to Golden Gate.

“Oh shit, I’m sorry. What happened?”

“He was 63 and a drinker. He just wore his body thin.”

Now Jelani can’t get his drum back. “I don’t really remember exactly where she lived, plus I’d have to tell her. We’d probably weep together.”

Maybe this wouldn’t be a bad thing, I suggest.

“Yeah, that was the first man who died in my arms,” he says, shaking his head as though the thought sits funny in there.

Sal came out with the bag of food. “Roast beef,” he says, “some chips and a coke. Oh, and a pudding. Chocolate. You like pudding?”

“I don’t really eat pudding, man,” Jelani says. “But I’m gonna try.”

I thank him for the talk and the pictures. “Stay warm,” I say.

“I hope you got some good ones,” he tells me, pointing to the camera.

*Not his real name, but he told me if I blogged him, he would “KILL ME DEAD.” So there you go, SAL.

One month ago I was in San Francisco—in the same apartment I’m headed back to today—when I posted my house on craigslist. It was a whim, just something I did to make Fannie Mae think I was serious about selling, when all I really wanted to do was walk away.

I never dreamed it would work.

Never dreamed.

But it worked.

And now, four weeks, a home inspection, another appraisal, a shockingly successful garage sale, way too much packing, not enough blogging, a bruisey week of moving, a final walkthrough, and one giant check later, today’s the day. The buyers sign my freedom papers at 10 AM this morning, but I’ll already be on the road, headed west for the next month or two. The title agent will call me when it’s all over—perhaps I’ll be as far as North Platte by then. I’m bound for Rock Springs, Wyoming this evening, where Stella and I spent three snowbound days during the shock and awe campaign, what seems like a hundred lives ago.

It seems appropriate to spend the night passing through a place I’ve gotten stuck before, because that’s exactly how I’ve felt for the last couple years—psychically snowbound, with only war and weather on the tv screen—and it’s the last thing I feel right now. I’m all coltish and hopeful these days, ready for some room to run. Today will feel sunfree, I hope, with no shocks, only awe.

Thanks for all your support over the last months and years—you know who you are, you know what you mean to me. Thanks, especially, to The Subtle Parents for loving and putting up with The Subtle Pups while I wander (and for loving and putting up with me in all my evolutions). I’ll miss you all. And thanks to my sister and the neph for giving me a reason to come back. Thanks to my Lincoln friends for the growing sense of community: you make it hard to leave here. And to my San Francisco friends, put your walking shoes on, we’ve got miles to cover and pictures to take. I can’t wait!

More later, from the road.

Image is Michael Crawford’s deconstruction of Rauschenberg Minus Nebraska by Chuck Close

Bossy is real! Real cool! Speaking in purely technical terms, she’s also real purty, even though I shot her through my patented “accidental tangerine” filter:

Here’s one thing I learned: Bossy may be my secret twin. We’re basically Lanky Bright and Dark: both tall, both the same amount of old but don’t feel it, both hopeful rovers with dogs named Stella (of course, hers is the size of a shetland and mine is more like a shetland’s hoof). It’s a rare treat to meet someone who can be both a mirror and a mentor.

I’d love to do what she’s done—not so much building a blogging kingdom, as bring people across the country together through will and charm and (literal) drive. For me, roadtrips are usually undertaken alone, but Bossy’s redefined the solo trek. She’s put in some hard miles and smiles over the past several weeks, crossing the country and hosting meetups in every city, but I bet when she looks back it’ll all be worth it. I know it was for me, so thank you, sister.

That’s lovely Rita from Surrender, Dorothy behind Bossy, but you’ll have to take my word for it (step away from the bokeh, Subtle Rudder). Rita works for BlogHer, and I have to get around to signing up. One of these days, I’m going to learn how to network like a big girl.

I think I drove the farthest to be there; most of the other women were from Kansas or Missouri. It was a very cool group, and pretty everyone knew each other already, which was a revelation to me. You mean you can make your internet contacts into real world friends? I have got to get out more.

Nimble drove in from Lawrence, and we got to hang together after the larger meetup was over. We figured out how we found each other (through Nancy Nall, via the coozle highway—it’s a dusty, rutted road where the neighbors are strange, the mules are goodlooking, and the writing makes you snort-laugh through your tears) and we talked about the big stuff: how we got to where we’re at, and where (and who) we want to be as the dial slips another season, year, decade. We’ve already decided on one place we’d like to go together: instead of meeting in the middle, Cooz, we want to come and hang with you and Raydell and the whole rurritable gang.

Of course, I had just enough Malbec to take a bunch of unimpressively soft pictures of friendly strangers, as well as some wine-fueled self portraits in the bathroom mirror. As you may know, I’m not comfortable being captured in two dimensions, although Bossy told me to get over my twitchy-grimacy self. I’m not sure this is what she had in mind, though:

That’s The Subtle Eyeball, reflected in the rearview mirror of dad’s truckbeast. I was jacking around with my camera in the Menard’s parking lot, while dad shopped for lumber to take to Kansas City last night. He’s here to work, but I’m here to commune with my digital sistren at the Bossy meetup tonight. We’re going to break out of the binary and drink with a bunch of fellow bloggers; words made (no doubt tipsy) flesh.

Mostly, I’m just happy to get out and see the people; that can be hard for me. It’s not that I’m anxious about social situations—when I’m out there, I’m fine. Gregarious, even. It’s just that I’m so much alone during my usual days that it’s often hard to open the door and make myself leave. Sometimes it feels safer and easier to stay put.

I’m most excited to meet Nimble, one of the wonderful never-mets this blog has brought into my life (you’re up next, Coozledad…what’s the midway point between Nebraska and North Carolina? And don’t say New Jersey, even though it’s the alphabetical halfway). She sent me an email this morning, observing with delight that my address could be read as “the subtler udder,” which may well be the case. I love a brain like that, one which finds joy in all the different ways you can read a word, a sentence, a situation. She will confirm for you whether this rudder is subtle or if the udder is subtler.

Stay tuned for more…and for god’s sake, join us at Waldo’s Pizza tonight, somewhere in KC, MO. (I’m getting dropped off so I have not retained an address, but the google, she will provide.)

PS: I’d like you to weigh in on something. What color do my eyes look to you? I’ve always called them hazel, which I figured meant unclear, changeable, not easily categorized (this may refer to more than my eye color). But I just met a woman who swears that hazel means golden green-brown and not the riverine blue-green-grey of my particular eyeballs. So now I need a new way to describe my eyes, and by extension, myself. What say you, my subtler udders?

When you first start taking pictures, you have to take a lot of shots before you begin to see what kind of photographer you might be. I’m still narrowing in on what my natural subjects are, but one thing I know for certain: I love taking pictures of things with eyes. I guess I like looking at something that looks back.

Here’s what I know about portraits so far: focus on the eyes, take a lot of shots, and blur that background, because the subject is everything. And we all know that this particular subject really is my everything:

Sometimes, you have to take the shot with the camera you’ve got. And when I’m wandering through tunnels by the zoo with the dogs, that’s always the iphone. I haven’t figured out a way to administer constant sharp leash corrections to Asshole, Jr. while also managing my big-girl camera and its unslender lens. I am just not that coordinated.

But the water in the tunnel was coursing along, just like we were, and there was all that fresh graffiti I couldn’t pass up, especially not with that abandoned bicycle over there. Plus, iphone shots are tailor made for arty processing, and I’m a big sucker for the faux-holga effect you get from camerabag. So here you go, Monday: your daily photo, all grit and underground. Imagine me there, a wafty strider with two mutts at my heels, leaning out over the water to get it for you.

PS: It turns out that everything hurts now. Maybe the long walk and the cardio were not a good pairing with yesterday’s grand spill. In any event, a scalding hot bath and a superhero origins film are in my very near future. I would keep reading Remnick’s book on Obama tonight, but it’s too damn heavy for my poor sore paws.

Ford and I have been playing the nose game for months now. “This is Ford’s nose,” I’d say, pressing his nose with my fingertip, and then, “this is Aunt Banana’s nose,” touching my own. Back and forth we’d go, until finally, when I’d say “where’s my nose?,” he’d get a sly, knowing look and touch the tip of my nose. Now he knows the nose, no matter who it belongs to, which made this moment in our zoo trip last saturday particularly sweet. Here are a couple more shots of Ford with the goats.

Although I’ve taken tons of pictures in the last couple months and I’m getting more comfortable with how to get the shots I want, I’ve had a really hard time with what happens after that. All my dad’s heart stuff really derailed my progress on the workflow process. Downloading the pictures has proven to be a real pain, since I don’t have much disk space on my laptop and I ordered the wrong mini-harddrive to use when I travel. So when I shoot RAW/JPG, I end up eating up all my space and crashing the mac. I’ve gone back to JPG-only until I get the storage and cataloging process down. I figure, nothing I shoot right now is really RAW-worthy (although watch, I’ll rip off some lucky shot today and kick myself for not having the extra image data to play with).

Of course, storage is only the beginning. Then you have to sort through your shots, flag the keepers, play with the images (which is its own dark art, at which I am merely a ham-handed dabbler), and finally upload the final shots to Flickr. Whew. I need a Canon pro to come over and walk me through the best process for all that. I’ve been using the bundled Canon software, but I’m not particularly happy with the system, since CameraWindow launches automatically and then immediately hangs. Does anyone out there know know which software offers the greatest ease and flexibility, without causing teeth-grinding irritation? (Adobe Bridge? Apple Lightroom? Some other thing I don’t know about? What do you use?) And does anyone want to come to my house and step me through the ideal process a few times? (It always takes me a while to finally figure out where my own nose is.)

Anyway, all this is to say that I have a giant backlog of photos from San Francisco, Rochester, Lincoln, and all points between, just waiting to find their home here. So stay tuned…

I’ve been beavering away on a post today, all about my feelings and what I’ve been going through, but fuckit, it’s Friday and I just bought a shredder* and a whole mess of sky-blue plastic tubs** at Super Target, so I’m gonna mince two years’ worth of easy credit offers and get down with my organizational self this evening.

Also, there may be wine.

So here’s to shaking it all off. Might I recommend some bedroom dancing and a culling of the sock drawer, to lighten both mood and load?

*Cross-cut, bitchez. No ferret-toothed tweaker’s gonna resurrect that low-interest come-on from Capital One on my watch.

To the tubs, and godspeed, my lovelies!

Continuing the puddle theme from yesterday…this was after a sideways rainstorm in San Francisco. It’s one of several jillion shots I have left to process from those heady days of photography; was it really only three weeks ago? This one shows off my wide-angle lens, and looks much cooler when you view it at the big-boy size. Just click the image and select “all sizes.”