Don’t screw the pooch.
This classic Fox Photo print photo has been in my desk drawer since at least 1988. I moved it from my parent’s house to my current office in 1999. It has been in the top desk drawer of the two desks that I’ve used for most of my life. In the catch-all drawer where things go to not die, but rest in an Abraham’s bosom of memory. A place where it is regularly found, but never really dealt with. A terrible place for a print to be sure, but also a light handed reminder to not screw the pooch.
The photograph is a snapshot of the screen of my Apple IIe while I played Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Simulator. I would spend hours at night flying the SR 71 on the edge of the atmosphere. Skipping that titanium beauty off the thin membrane of the atmosphere perilously depicted in that virtual world. Any wrong move would send you spinning down into the inky black Earth, to sudden death. I tried for over a year to get that plane as high as I could and document it. I remember getting as high as 89,000 feet, but this is the only picture I ever took. I was always so wrapped up in the moment, the documentation never happened. As a result, this is the only picture I took and as high as I can ever prove that I went. The game was replaced the computer went away, and all that remains is this picture… and an unfulfilled dream. As Chuck would say “You really screwed the pooch on that one.”
Many years later, I had a photography professor who used to say “If you saw it, you missed it.” Whenever he said that I would think of that picture of the SR 71 at 71,000 feet. Obviously, it’s not important to me now, but that photo has always served as a reminder to me. It reminds me to do the work that I need to make the photographs that I want to make. But it also reminds me that it might not work out sometimes and that I shouldn’t beat myself up about it.
I’m taking this print out of my desk drawer now. It has served its purpose… has done, for a long time. After 35 years I can safely say that I have internalized the lessons. I’m going to file the print and exorcise another demon of detritus from my life.
