It has been a long week here. We’re wrapping up a major project at work today and I am very happy to have it done, but it’s taken a lot from the whole team to get it there.

Our theme for today is trouble, which just fell into my lap last week when I looked out my window and saw a couple of cop cars shining their lights directly into the front of my house. Intrigued? I’ll tell the story.

Photos

1.

So like I said, I looked out of my window and saw two cop cars. I didn’t know why they were there, but I also wanted to make sure they weren’t trying to come into my house with my dog in there, so I stepped out to try and talk to them. I was immediately asked to go back inside the house.

Since they didn’t arrest me, I figured I was not the subject of the operation and guessed that the people next door who were widely believed by those of us who lived nearby to be drug dealers were the targets. Since I was trapped in my house with two LED light bars blazing into any available crack in the curtains and the glass in the front door, I figured I could at least try to get some neat photos.

My idea was to try and capture the feeling of the person who was actually on the wrong end of the investigation that evening. I wanted it to feel like the viewer was peeking through the curtain and hoping in vain that they were going to get out of this situation. I framed a slice of the cop car in the curtain gap, making sure to get the headlight in frame to give off the feeling of the car watching the viewer through the photo.

I wasn’t originally planning on a black-and-white edit, but when I tried it, I liked the starkness. I felt like it enhanced the feeling of being trapped. The whole frame is black and the only option left is directly into trouble.

I did find out later that the target of the operation was the drug house, and that it was not a Dallas PD operation, but a DEA raid, which explains why there wasn’t an entry on the active call list. Big trouble.

Original:

2.

This is one of my favorite photos to come out of the pandemic. I took this shot on April 11, back when people still wiped down their groceries. This school track/soccer field was immediately declared off-limits to everyone when the schools closed down. Evidently this ban was going to be enforced with a roll of police tape across the entrances. That lasted all of about twelve seconds and kids were hard at play immediately.

The whole early pandemic era felt like a zombie movie in a lot of ways, and I thought this composition really captured that feeling better than almost any of my other shots from that time. You don’t have enough information to know why the gate is taped off, but given the lack of human activity and police lights, you can assume that whatever occurred to cause the taping wasn’t particularly recent.

The orange hue to the light in the background adds to the spooky, dangerous feeling, and I like how it gives the tape a backlight in some areas. I didn’t really do a whole lot of editing; just some color adjustment and a crop.

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Links

1. A thread about suiting and Gerard Basquiat by Derek Guy (Menswear Guy)

I love Derek Guy. He’s taught me so much about suiting in general and even if you’re not a real fashion person, just knowing what looks good and why will help you see other people’s clothing in a different light. He was one of the people I was saddest to leave when I moved my microblogging from Twitter to Bluesky. He’s started putting some of his threads on Bluesky lately, which is where I saw this one.

If you’re not already a fan of Menswear Guy, I can’t recommend him highly enough. If you’re not already on Bluesky, you’re missing out. The site has the juice.

2. Drake’s Autumn Transitional Lookbook

Autumn is my favorite time of year1. Summer is too hot to wear anything, but fall gives us permission to pull out the fuzzy sweaters and ridged corduroy and textured tweed. Prep/Ivy style thrives in the colder months, and Drake’s is the king of the lookbooks for these periods of the year.

3. A new conduit for empathy by

More than the what-ifs, which are ultimately pointless, his framing stayed with me. Stays with me still. As a flash of doubt, secondhand embarrassment, when I see a white bike festooned with fake flowers at an intersection I use all the time, or heard about Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau being killed by a drunk driver, outside of any realm of familiarity. These seizing flashes of emotional and bodily repose to tragic, senseless, abruptly violent deaths.

Do they have anything to do with me? From my brain: No. From my body: A very pronounced stillness. Something deep and dormant, perking up. An accordioning of time. Years into yesterday. The damp smell of leaf litter, an ease in my muscles that always comes after spending time with my brother, the solid, capable feeling the metal teeth of the bike pedals pushing into the worn soles of my Vans gave me.

The body keeps score but you’ve no idea the reckoning.

The effect of celebrity deaths on people who have never met them are a strange circumstance of the hyperconnected world we live in, and I don’t think many of us really know how to emote about them without being weird.

Katie Heindl reached the rarified air of grieving a celebrity death without it being weird. This is a wonderfully human piece that connects the cultural gravity of the death of a celebrity to the mundane deaths of regular cyclists that happen in this country every day. It’s well worth a read.