This year and this project have really been a sort of coming to terms with my own identity crisis; but now two thirds of my way through it I cannot tell if I am actually resolving or worsening the impact it’s actually having on me. In many ways I have come to terms with how I see myself. There is a greater acceptance of where I currently reside on the issues of being a gay man coming to terms with middle age, being creative and living in Montana. I feel like I have found clarity on so many of the issues I have struggled with. But there is a part of it that still remains hidden and I have begun to wonder if somehow I have derailed myself from the original intention of my beginning this process. I find that I keep checking myself to ensure that I am being true and honest to my nature. It is so easy to become influenced by the Internet and my communication to others I interact with in this space. But does that mean that my reality is actually evolving into something beyond my own consciousness? When I began this process at the beginning of the year, the one question I asked myself everyday was, “Am I being honest in my views and reflections of my world?” If I could not say yes, I would have to start over and write a new posting for the day. And yes there were many days where I felt I was trying to effect what I was doing instead of getting at the core of my true feelings and I would have to start over. Now it has somehow become second nature and it seems to flow as a stream of consciousness. I often become completely oblivious to what comes pouring out. The flip side to the worsening of the identity crisis is that perhaps I am reaching a bit too hard or desperately for something that is beyond where I really need or want to go. It is so easy to be seduced by cyberspace and allow yourself to slip into a sort of heightened sense of a false reality. One of my greatest fears is becoming delusional about who or what I am. I fear if I buy into a delusional fantasy, will I become lost from the true nature of what brings me to this place from the beginning. I have really tried to maintain the balance and be practical throughout the process and still try to remain honest to myself. I have recently begun a conversation with someone who has been giving me some honest feedback on this project. They have reminded me that what really makes this project interesting is my insight and experience, that this project is really about me. Who I am and what I have to share. It kind of caught me off guard, because in a way I feel that I have lost that focus and have been bringing my energy around toward a dream, and have become so caught in the dream that I forgotten the self. The dream will come, but not if it becomes the focus. I can see now I need to get back to what inspires the core of my creative process and let go of the process itself. This weekend I have been dismantling my old darkroom. And as I went back to the old space I read something I had scribbled on the cupboard door above my printing area to remind myself of each day, so many years ago when I was first beginning “PRINT WHAT YOU FEEL WITHOUT INTENT!”

I am getting back into the swing of things this morning. I have finally had a normal night of sleep and back into Montana time. I woke up this morning thinking about how I have been half way around the world and connected to so many other artists and people in other cultures, but have I neglected those that already surround me here in my home region? I used to be very involved in my own community and knew everyone. Now it feels like I know very few people, as my circle of friends seemed to have grown smaller. Is it because it is so easy now to interact on the Internet that we can associate with others so far away and yet not interact with those around the corner? It is the human interaction that I so crave and somehow seem to miss. Part of the problem being in and/or from Montana is that most of us long to escape it. Many of us born and raised here have a yearning to live a life beyond the confines of our little mountainous area. Most people seem to complain that the dating pool is one of the reasons for leaving and thus it makes Missoula and Montana a very transient place to be. Once I have begun to cultivate a friendship and get to know someone well, it seems they are gone, never to return. I miss this and I particularly miss them. I have mostly only dated people from Montana and have always found most of the people and relationships I have had here extremely healthy and fulfilling. There tends to be an honesty here that takes a long time to cultivate then in larger population. I have lived in several large cities and my experience there was that people where mostly wanting something from you instead of seeing you for who you really where. I began to distrust others, whereas I never quite felt that back in Montana. It is true the creative people have no market here and resources to be creative sometimes have to be as creative to survive. It used to be this was a cheap place, and rent was always next to nothing so it didn’t take much to actually get by and you could mostly live by the seat of your pants if you needed to. But now the housing market has gone so high, I suspect mostly due to property taxes, that it’s becoming comparable to small cities and without the job market, it makes staying here even less appealing. Yet there is still a body of us that still remain and linger. The other day I was the University Bookstore in the art department looking for some supplies when I ran into an old friend Laramie, he said, “I read your blog everyday and love it.” Why have I not connected with him? He is an incredibly talented playwright, who wrote one of the most moving plays I have ever seen about growing up gay in Montana. It really got me thinking, here is someone who knows my work and who I also admire, why are we not connecting and collaborating and inspiring each other? I guess I didn’t honestly know he was still here. In many ways Facebook becomes a double edge sword, in that it can very easily bring some people together, but has become so massive that it masks others that right before our very eyes. One of my new goals is to begin to meet some of the people within my very community. I am open to have dinner, to have coffee, to chat or just to hang out. I really need this sense of community right now and am going to make a greater effort to reach out and try to discover who is here. Please, please, please if you are living in Missoula or a nearby area, let me know who you are? I want to know more, I want to discover more, and am in need of meeting you. Contact me via Facebook or send me a text or e-mail. Let’s discover how we can collectively begin to feed each other’s needs for socialization.

It is Friday 4 am in the morning; it is the day after my return and my mind is still reeling with thoughts France. Somehow I feel the memories and thoughts of that extraordinary time slipping away as I grasp to hang on to my connection to it and not let go of the impact it’s had on me. The last day has been a period of adjustment, mostly allowing my body to become decompressed from travel. This morning it is dark outside still, I know the dawn will break soon, but for this moment, in my mind I am back in France. I have fixed some very strong coffee with milk and sugar. Cut the left over baguette from last night’s dinner lengthwise and spread it with butter and marmalade. This is my petit déjeuner. I put on some ballads of the French singer Edit Piaf on the studio sound system and the beauty of Paris vividly returns to my mind. Yesterday when I went to the supermarket I said “Bonjour Madam” as I entered and made eye contact to a woman in the store. Then, when I accidentally bumped into someone and found myself saying “Excusez-moi monsieur” in French with out even thinking. This morning I ponder the difference between our countries and cultures. I have always heard the French are rude and are portrayed in American culture as being difficult, au contraire, I now find that a myth made up by others who have probably never left our country, because I experienced their people as the exact opposite. They are a gentle culture that is concerned with a polite courtesy toward others that is filled with a gracious generosity. It is a culture of mutual respect. Everyone I met was extremely grounded, entrenched in their sense of history, pride, and a stoic humanity. These are the elements I remember about my grandfather, who was also French, and spoke the language to me as a child. They are the best qualities of me, and a part of my own heritage that I never quite understood until this trip to France. Paris is a city of noise, almost deafening at times, yet the people are quite and reserved. Stepping back into the US airport again, the first thing I am aware of is how noisy and loud the people have become, a constant roar of chatter, saying nothing really, but just talking, talking, talking: and I want to retreated back within myself. We are a culture that consumes things, and then discards it when we are finished, constantly trying to live outside of ourselves. Where everyone has some sort of notable dysfunction that is namable for which we can prescribe and consume something to overcome it. I realize this is what we are sold on early and how we have been conditioned to live. There was a kid that sat next to me on the plane, very young, didn’t really appear he had much means, but though the course of my 3 hour flight from DC to Denver, be pulled out and used the newest laptop computer, an I-pad and an I-phone. He then ordered a snack box on the plane for $10; a cardboard box filled with packaged processed food without any nutritional value and when he pulled out a wallet of credit cards to pay for it I began to understand his means of survival. I pondered to my own astonishment about how this value has become the norm for our culture and I began to question why did life in France seem so much simpler. I was lucky this trip I got to stay with a real Frenchmen in a real French apartment. His world was so self-contained. All the time I was there he really didn’t leave the apartment except to go shopping for dinner. The building he lived in was old and you could tell had been many different spaces before it became an apartment, but everything was adequate, and each day the whole place was filled with the most beautiful light. There was a standard television, and adequate sound system. The apartment contained a very small kitchen with a two-burner hotplate stove, a portable inside grill, a half size refrigerator, a built in dishwasher and clothes washer under a very small sink but no clothes dryer, just a rack to hang things on. He somehow prepared the most extraordinary meals in such a small space. It was small, but absolutely organized and functional. I asked how long he had lived there and he said 10 years. He seems to live a life filled with contentment and mostly worked from his home. The only thing new was a computer, which he used for work. I also stayed in a typical French hotel. It is a very old city, and everything feels like it has been retrofit to and pieced together to make it functional, yet it all containing a real ambience of place and history, what we would consider substandard by US terms. The French seem to be a people not filled with internal conflict or strife, settled, content not overly concerned with grooming and appearance and all those things I feel insecure about within myself. In many ways Paris feels like a dirty city though I constantly saw people cleaning it. Washing the streets and sidewalks and I realized it’s just old and well worn, part of its charm and beauty. There seems to be something historic about everything that surrounds you and its citizens wear the connection to that history as a badge of honor.

On the voyage home I kept making lists of what I now need to accomplish and try to come up with a plan or approach on how to get these things accomplished. But walking through the door I realized my life is already complete and perhaps none of that really seems to matter anymore. This is a remarkable place; Montana, my studio/home and I live an extraordinary existence. Everything I have ever wanted is really here. I have accomplished everything I have ever set out to do. I lead a life doing what I find meaningful, things I am passionate about. I have created a part of myself I have been able to share with so many others. I have been accepted in the world that I was so afraid to face. As I stepped into my oversized shower, that I have built with my own hands, to wash away the remnants of a city I left so far behind, I felt a keen sense of loss but also a feeling of comfort to have the luxury of my life I have for so long taken for granted. I am glad to be home where I belong. Joy and contentment fill my tired ragged worn body as I became keenly aware that this is turning into the finest year of my life. As I know this is only the beginning.

Well here it is my last night in Paris. Wow what an awesome day. I leave tomorrow for 20 hours of travel to return to my mountain home in Montana. Today I just wandered around my favorite parts of the city and photographed all day. I felt at peace today, though I was a bit unnerved by my lack of communication the past couple of days. It is so odd to be isolated from all the things we know that make us thrive. Yet I am in the heart of a very big city, with millions of people and I cannot seem to communicate very well. The Internet was out most of the day at my hotel again, and I had to find an Internet café where they could hardwire my laptop into a line to make it work. I guess these are just the things we take for granted and when we hit a stumbling black it becomes a major obstacle that seems to take an insurmountable effort to actually over come. My biggest question why was I so technologically challenged. In many ways I am old fashioned and have not embraced some of the modern technology that would have made this easier, yet a damn I-phone, I see everyone using them, but the need in Montana seems to little. I did have a phone specifically set up for international use from my provider; it was too simple to work. The language is also somewhat of a barrier. I did not have any problems getting around, buying tickets, ordering coffee, food or groceries, but I was not able to have conversations. This is the city of many people with many languages, and you can tell by others expressions that many are the same as me, strangers in a city on the verge of barely comprehending just trying to survive. I find the people here extremely kind, going out of their way to be hospitable and welcoming and overall warm and kind. Most of them I met who I could communicate with were very curious about us as Americans in the US, our culture, our economics, and our sense of livelihood. Being here I have seen my own life through a new perspective now and have somehow become more self-aware.

It was a very sleepless night, of tossing and turning, on the verge of sleeping but not really sleeping at all. I am a terrible flight traveler and do not like to be in the air; besides that I had an espresso at dinner, which I knew I should not so late. This trip has been very good for what I came to achieve. Though I was not able to meet with everyone I had arranged from the beginning, I have made other contacts and seen first hand how the art world here operates. It just takes time to make it all happen, many of the galleries are booked for years in advance, but overall there seems to be great enthusiasm toward what I am working on. In many ways I think some of it is too simplistic, it does not have the complexity of work that make images survive in a world of this sort of art. I think in many ways my greatest asset is my ability to design and control the light and create an over all beauty in the images, but it time now to bump it up a notch or level in it’s emotional content to tell more of a story through the imagery. I can now see emptiness in some of the images. Though up to this point I recognize it has been a process of learning and discovery. I now see where it needs to go and others I have seen here that have given me better examples and a new point of view. Creation is an on going process, yet it is still a process of telling your own story from your own perspective. I think when shows open up where I able to display my work, I will have moved to a more interesting level with more consistency. I am finding right now that it is the journal of life and how l live that has become more of a fascination for most following this project, though for foreign cultures, the text is a bit too much to read and follow and often does not translate well for something like Google Translate. The basic concepts and ideas are there, but the nuance is lost in translation. I have never seen myself as a writer, and as I look back at some of what I have written I see that it is strong. Someone here suggested that an exhibit here would be well to also have a recording to the text also playing with the displayed images, perhaps even read the models. There is a host of possibilities and yet I still have four more months to complete what I have begun. I am almost 2/3 of the way though the process. Wow to think how far it has come to this point is remarkable. There is too little time to accomplish and I am sorry I was not able to meet everyone I intended on such a short trip as this, but I have taken a bite out of a very large elephant. I now must head for my plane, three flights, and twenty hours travel not including getting here this morning. And perhaps a few days of recovery. Thank you to all who have helped me in France and Germany and help guide and inform my process. The next post will be from the comfortable sofa in my beautiful studio unless of course I sleep the following twenty-four hours after beyond that.

It is my last day in Paris and as I sit in the beautiful garden it has begun to rain, not just a light rain, but also a heavy rain. I cower under an umbrella under my table as water begins to flicker on my arms the nape of my exposed neck. So far, when it has rained in Paris it generally passes quickly but today it will probably become a deluge and rain all day since is this is my last day here. Perhaps I will have to go to my room, put some Miles Davis or Dexter Gordon on my I-pod, and just spend the day writing. The hotel seems to be having some sort of internet failure for the guests, and my cell phone stopped working within the first week so I am really alone on such a rainy day in Paris.

The rain has finally won and forced me inside. As I climb the twisty old staircase, there is the sound of Indian music that fills the stairwell and the smell of incenses. Everything is dirty here, worn, old. Nothing seems to fit and it is all pieced together little by little, year by year until the original form is no longer recognizable and it all looks like a shambled mess. I hear the sounds of sewage being flushed though pipes on the outside of the building. At least I have a bathroom with a shower. I am on the top floor looking inward toward the hotel and only see the rooms across the garden. A middle-aged man in his underwear appears in an open window below, he smokes and watches the sky. I can see by his expression it is not going to be a good day for him either. Suddenly many of the rooms below me become alive with people waking, dressing, showering. I begin to feel I am the character in the Hitchcock film Rear Window as I sit at small wobbly desk in the window and write.

Dexter Gordon blowing his sax on a tune called Darn That Dream is both soothing and calms my nerves energy but is disconcerting to my state of mind, as I ponder if all that I have come to Paris for has been a success? In some ways, yes I have made some incredible connections and found a calmer side to my restless soul, but on the other side, no I have been confronted by the realization that this process does not happen over night, like we always tend to dream in the United States. It’s going to take a lot of work, considerable time, and endless effort, to make a go of this. And I am sure it’s going to take days for the effects of this journey to settle in my mind. Another man strips in another window across one level down, I see him fully exposed, absolutely bare, I laugh at the irony of myself being the naked man, seeing more nudity this morning from my window. It is becoming amusing and yet I am filled with a sadness and a loneliness like I have never known. I can see the sky from my window and the clouds are beginning to break. The coolness is a relief after all the muggy hotness. I can smell the smoke from Cigarettes wafting up from the courtyard below as all the naked people are now dressed and eating their petit dejeuner (breakfast.) The final window opens to reveal another naked man sitting at his window trying to get his laptop to work, as I want to yell across the courtyard “good luck with that one buddy”. He scratches his head in discouragement.

I did manage to spend most of the day at the Louvre, went early afternoon when there were throngs of people that I could barely work my way trough the crowds, took a break and then returned again late afternoon when it was not quite so crowded to see the remaining things I really wanted to see. The Louvre is probably the most impressive collection of art in the world. To walk its massive galleries and corridors is like stepping into another time, many other times. It represents the best of every artistic period up to the modern era perfectly categorized into country, origin, and history. It’s almost overwhelming to see so much really remarkable works. I found myself constantly going in circles and sometimes ending up in the same place, with the woman in the same chair, probably taking the same nap, when I realized I been lost. In the wilderness, we mark the trees when we are lost, but in a place like this, the beautiful colors and frames should be your markers, but there is such an abundance that I was so often disoriented and confused by direction or time. Then suddenly I would step into a gallery and would be captivated by something I recognized from my study in books so long ago. It’s vibrancy becomes it’s own seduction on the wall. Indeed there is a plan, but perhaps this is the real way to experience the majestic world of The Lourve. I thought I was fairly educated on art, its history and many of its movements, but I felt like a complete fool seeing so much stuff I had never heard of before. It would take years to even research. It was a humbling experience to stand before an original Caravaggio painting and gaze into its haunting beauty. The images in the books do no justice to the brilliance of what the images are as they hang before you in such a place. So many of them are massive that I caught myself wondering how does an artist maintain such perspective.

The sun is beginning to break over the top of the building before me. Its warmth fills my face. It is time to get out and explore this fascinating world one more day. What haven’t I done that needs to be done? Where haven’t I been that needs to be seen? Today is for me.