Patrick Lewis Photography

I posted this on facebook a while back. I figured I'd slap it up on DA because I'm lazy and haven't updated my journal in a long time.


I often find myself strangely enamored with the idea of what it is to be me. What it is to be one single human being in the world. I have conceptualized my non-physical self into a tangible, almost visceral thing--that is, I can almost feel my identity as it deftly controls this meat sack that it is trapped in. I am essentially a giant bag of atoms that work in conjunction with one another to provide with the gift of existence, but what can be said about the spectrum of human emotion? It transcends who I am physically, and renders it somewhat useless. However, I must admit that the physical self is extremely important, as it is what places me here in this universe, and it governs what I am, which is equally as important as who I am. I am lost in wonder at the thought of being self aware. Perceiving the world around me and moving through the void of time, and what's more, my awareness of such things. Entire days can pass where I am wholly and completely inside of my own being. This is not to say that I do not have complete control over my actions and functionality, but that i never really engage in any of what is going on around me. I feel as if I am floating in a mental cloud: thoughts flow freely, but none of them can be wrestled into a translation that would make sense to the physical world. I used to metaphorically wear a thick jacket that allowed me to coast through my days, callous and uncaring towards the world that seemed to show little to no regard for me. The problem with this jacket is that it was manufactured badly, and it has holes. Emotion can get through as easily as it can be blocked out, and when it found a hole, it was as if I'd been hit by the sledgehammer of human connection. To feel, good or bad, is a human privilege, and should be viewed as such. To float through life without any true connections to the world is what leaves people feeling hollow and meaningless. I had a sense of this disconnect a while back, and I made some bad decisions on how to remedy my feeling of emptiness. Feelings have begun to ring true again, and I can see into the future, instead of just seeing the shroud of meaninglessness that had been draped over my tired brain. My stream of consciousness is bordering on rambling as it runs the course of my swampy synapse garden. Tangled in the translation of thought, I roll my mind over what is most prevalent. The broken heart from a love that I poured my entire being into. Not knowing how much of myself I had given to it, I was blindsided by it's end. I can see now that it was for the better. The feeling of potential in new relationships and an optimistic outlook towards that potential had recently become at the forefront of my mind. Walking through my life, entranced by my own ability to make things endlessly more confusing than they are in actuality, wondering why there must be so much "why?" in my life. There I go again. I come stumbling out of every ideological prolapse as if it had blasted me into another dimension. Does every successful validation of something have to be a fucking epiphany? Everything is a hunger for more, in the deepest recesses of my psyche, even though that hunger cannot be translated into anything applicable to my life. Even now, my ideas flow out of my brain and into my fingers like I overdosed on intellectual diuretic. My brain is filled to the brim with ideas of philosophy and fiction, to the point where I cannot even finish (or sometimes even start) one of them. This blathering rant lacks any semblance of structure, mostly due to the overwhelming number of pertinent ideas on the subject. I think too much.

E-mail:

patrick.lewis@colorado.edu

plphotography@mac.com