…is that you risk running across ones of an old crush wearing really, really sexy cut-offs like guys used to back in the 70s before American males became paranoid about being sexy below the waist.

I always had a pretty well organized filing system for my black and white negatives.  My slides were another story.  Since I wasn’t in a position to be able to afford a color darkroom back when I was a teenager, I just made do with keeping them in the boxes they came back from Kodak in.  Occasionally I would develop my own color slide film, which you could theoretically do without a major darkroom setup.  But the old Kodak E-4 processing kit was expensive and at the end of it was the tedious task of mounting all those slides yourself.  So I didn’t do that too often.  But I did it enough that I can at least say that, yes, I did some of my own color work back then.  Just not prints.

So the slides had their own very haphazard filing system which was basically just numbers on the boxes, and a little info about what they were.  Now that I’m well into the Big Scan project, I needed to get them a tad more organized then they are.  See…the boxes of slides never had contact sheets associated with them like the negatives did.  If I needed to find a particular black and white photo I would look through the contact sheets for it, and when I found it that contact sheet would have a number on it that corresponded to a glassine envelope with the negatives for that sheet in it.  But to find a particular color slide I had to rummage through the boxes until I found the one I thought it was in, open it, and sort through the slides, eyeballing each one until I found what I was looking for.  So searching for a slide always meant handling and shuffling through a lot of them, in a way that searching for a negative never did.

The end result over time was a mess.  Over the years far, far too many slides ended back up in the wrong boxes.  At one point there was a group of them I just gave up on, and tossed them all together into one big box.  I tried buying projector trays and storing a few boxes of slides in those, so I could search using a projector or slide viewer, instead of handling them all individually.  By the time I got around to getting all my old slides organized for the Big Scan, I had about three concurrent filing systems for them, and none of them were up to date.

So this weekend I’ve been sorting them all back together, into their original roll film groups.  The problem was worst in the slides from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s.  That bunch needed a lot of work getting them all back together in the right order, and it didn’t surprise me.  That period of time in my life was right before the decade when I just put my cameras (and all my other art tools) away, because I just couldn’t cope with my feelings.  As badly alone as I’m feeling now, I was really crushed emotionally back then.  Life was just complete bleakness and I felt I had no future to look forward to at all.  I just couldn’t bear to look at anything I did creatively because that inner desolation kept staring back at me from all of it…

…and ironically enough, that’s when I turned to computer programming as a creative outlet.  So in a very strange way I’m earning a damn good living now, because of this horrible personal life crisis I had back then.

Anyway…It was like an intensely condensed review of that part of my life before a lot of darkness fell.  And one-by-one all my old boyfriends and all the old crushes, all the guys who made my heart beat, and who one-by one broke it a little more, came popping out of the stacks of slides back at me.  Including one I saw just a while ago, that I really, really wish I hadn’t, of one guy in particular who I became way, way too strung out over once upon a time, and who told me a year ago that I needed to stay in the closet if I wanted to make more friends.

I was sorting through some slides I took on a visit to see him when he lived down in Florida back in the early 1980s.  We were strolling along the beach and I snapped a few shots of him.  He’s just wearing a light short sleeved shirt and these really nice cut-offs.  Sometimes he’s smiling back at the camera.  Sometimes he’s looking handsomely off into the distance.

Funny how beautiful a tornado can be to behold.  I guess that’s why there are storm chasers.  But they know to keep their distance.  I didn’t.