One of my favorite recent shots from my Alley set. This was taken in Christopher, Illinois.

The subject I photograph least is myself, but in my feeds this week I saw something about “Self-portrait Wednesday.” I decided was due a new picture of myself.

Part of my Alley Set, I hope to get more and more rainy shots like this as winter gives way to spring.

One of my goals is to get more people into my work. This is my buddy Chris being kind enough to indulge me.

“Go stand over there… no, in the doorway…and look away… look away like you’re pimpin’.”

“What?”

Another from my Alley shots series.

The cold also chases away the tourists.  I like my alley shoots to be as solitary as possible.

Although, there was one visitor here.

See her just below the lower right corner of the window furthest to left?

I was shooting with the wider lens and ran the picture to contrast in the processing, so she just looks like a little hunched ball of fur.

There are more Alley Shots at Flickr & deviantArt.

It was in the summer a little more than ten years ago when he left.  He’d been conversing electronically with a woman from Toronto in the years prior to that summer.  She made him an ultimatum:  Come see her to determine what this relationship of theirs was.  And so in the span of weeks he made plans to go to Toronto.

Just like that.  Without taking the time to think and think and think about it.  Without a hint of what might happen once he got there.

He prepared for the trip.  He secured tickets for trains.  He made reservations in Chicago, the solitary layover on the trip.

Then, one afternoon, he stepped aboard the train.  He watched as the train took him from the place of his birth to places he had never been before.  That night he stepped off into the bustle of Chicago.  It felt cooler there.  The humidity had forgotten to follow him from home.  That coolness, along with the rush of people, seemed to make the city feel so very alive.  And then he took a taxi through the bright night to a hotel.

Sleep.  A good sleep.

He woke to a call from the front desk, and he asked them to order a taxi for a return trip to the train station.   A little brown man drove the taxi.

“Where are you going?” the little brown man asked.

“Union Station,” the man who went to Toronto said.

“Plenty of time for that,” the little brown man said.  He added, “See some sights before you go?”

Yes.  The man who went to Toronto was anxious to make it to the train station, but in his heart the man who went to Toronto also wanted to see some sights as long as they could get to the train station on time.

Lake Shore Drive during the bustle of morning rush hour.  Navy Pier.  Buckingham Fountain.  Soldier Field.

“China Town?” the little brown man said.  If only the man who went to Toronto had had more time, but there was a train to catch.

A longer train it was, but one which peeled back the upper Midwest, revealing sight upon sight.  The urban moonscape of the south side of Chicago.  A nuclear reactor just south of Lake Michigan.  Across northern Indiana and through the heart of Michigan.  Battle Creek, where they make all your cereals, and a giant cartoon tiger stands guard.  Lansing.  Flint.  Then, Point Huron, last stop in the US before that long dark dive through the tunnel which connects to Canada.

And that moment in Sarnia on the other side.  In another country.  That moment which defined being in another country.  The officials with their plastic tubs of safety equipment.  The officials with their vests and clipboards.

“Identification, please.”

The man who went to Toronto displayed the official birth certificate showing he had been born officially in the US.  They took down his information, and just like that he was a foreign visitor just like some of the little brown people who shared the train car with him.

Then up through Ontario to London, which is not only in England.  There had been banners in London.  Pennants at a car dealership or tractor dealership.  They had wafted so happily in the late afternoon breeze.  Then Woodstock.  Cambridge.  Finally the place called Mississauga.  Some place that sounded foreign.  It was evening then, and the city, like the other city the night before, lit the night.

Toronto.

There had been the same cool dry feeling as in Chicago, but it was so quiet in this part of town.  Another taxi.  Another hotel.  This time, a much  higher floor.  The man who went to Toronto swore he could feel the building sway in the gentle wind.

And the woman.  In the same building.  A floor up?  A floor down?  It was discussed on the telephone but there would be no meeting that night because it was late.  For breakfast.

The lobby the next morning.  The meeting.

The man who went to Toronto had traveled hundreds of miles for the meeting.

The man who went to Toronto had traveled hundreds of miles for the meeting.

The man who went to Toronto had traveled hundreds of miles for the meeting.

This is written three times just to remember that it was so.  The man who went to Toronto, who had never done such a thing in his life before, did this thing with as little concern as folks who drive to the mall now.

The man who went to Toronto was happy to see the woman.  They had breakfast.  They walked the streets of downtown Toronto where the man who went to Toronto learned about two dollar coins and exchange rates.  They went to a bookstore where he bought a copy of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom.  And as their first day drew to a close, they boarded a bus that would take them to the woman’s family home, just north of the city.

The man who went to Toronto stayed at the woman’s family home in a bedroom tucked away like a place of his own.

The man who went to Toronto never once stopped to think that he subsisted on the whims of this adventure.  In a foreign land.  With no set transport.  With little money but what he could squeeze from his bank account.  The man who went to Toronto lived day to day at the woman’s family home.  All but strangers except for words on a page or words on a screen.

The man who went to Toronto never once stopped to think that he subsisted on the whims of this adventure.

The man who went to Toronto never once stopped to think that he subsisted on the whims of this adventure.

The man who went to Toronto learned about being a man in different ways.  The man who went to Toronto learned about sharing his life with the woman with carts laden with bags of milk and camping in front of the TV and trips to the bookstore.  The man who went to Toronto learned about growing old in a retirement home.  The man who went to Toronto learned how to entertain children with improvised stories.

Then the man who went to Toronto had to be elsewhere.  Just as some journeys strengthen us, others only put us back in our places.  And so the man who went to Toronto went elsewhere.

I see him sometimes now.  Not often enough.

From my Chaos set on Flickr

In seven minutes one of two things would happen:  The Trader Satriane would exit her sling-shot maneuver from behind a gas giant and catch our attacker off guard with a short range blast from our secondary weapons.  That attacker would be disabled worse than us and we could escape into the outer system where we would repair our primary drive and weapons.  Or, the Trader Satriane would surprise no one and my First Officer or one of my other junior officers would kill me for incompetence, claiming the ship and my commanding shares in her,  and try something else before their seven minutes ran out.

Telling myself that the Trader Satriane should have never been put in that position in the first place was pointless, and yet it was the very thing I found myself doing as I watched time tick away on the mother-of-pearl dials of the main control board.

Only I had allowed the ship bearing the Aetheriat’s identifcation codes and markings to match orbit with us  for docking.  Only I had been surprised when two mechs dropped out of her load bay and sprayed our primary power arrays with EMP nets.  Only I was responsible for the Trader Satriane succumbing to paralysis about us.

If I had not realized these things myself, then surely the eyes of my FO would have told me so.  His gaze burned me now not in anger, but in disappointment. I had failed the ship and him.  The Old Man had failed.

As he stood there at his post, one hand rested on the polished teak railing, while the other rested upon the hilt of the dagger which in the Aetheriat was far more than ceremonial.  Tall.  Sinewy.  Hungry.  A reflection of myself twenty years ago.  He would kill me without hesitation for jeopardizing the ship, just as I had my predecessor.  We were bound to such extreme ways.  He would not, however, be able to claim my wife as spoil, as I had claimed my Merchant-Captain’s woman.  A common death had already taken my Tila.  A power-weaver, she had been claimed by tumors common to engineers which work the arrays.

Tila.

My right hand spasmed.

Yes, the emotional pain was not enough, but my body had to remind me of my physical weakness.

I looked at my FO.  Had he seen the tremble?

To hell with him if he had.  I might tremble a moment, but I was also still the man who might save us.  I was the man who had sent the Trader Satriane plunging into the sling-shot orbit.  I was the man who ordered one of our mechs dropped from our load bay with a 5-megaton mining charge.  It’s explosion just might suggest that we had blown up as we slipped around the backside of the gas giant.  Aetheriat Merchant-Captains with Aetheriat ships under primary power, lazy in their omnipotence to natural law, rarely considered simple orbital mechanics as tactical maneuvers.  They also rarely strayed toward the expanding debris field of an exploded trader.  So many bits and pieces of irradiated hullcrete traveling at ungodly velocities could trouble the best shields and leave them just as they thought they had left us.

Yes, wait there where we left you, fool.  Wait for us to whip around the gas giant and let fly simple ballistics from gilt-inlaid magnetic barrels trained upon your heart by our telekins.

My FO watched me carefully.

The Old Man has not fully failed you yet, boy.  That gleam is hope, not the madness of fear. Oh, I know this last year has showed you that Fear and Doubt sit at my table.  But they take only what they can niggle from me.  Not whole bites. I have been hurt, not beaten. Three more minutes of faith, boy.  Three more minutes and then I’ll step from this chair so as not to stain its silk cushions with my blood.

I requested an update on our trajectory.  The bald psycomp at the control board sung calculations to herself, adjusted sliders and dials ever so slightly on the clock-work control board, and nodded at me.  On course.

I requested an update on our weapons.  The telekin nodded from his cybernetic sling in the weapons niche.  His mind reached out to locate our attacker.  At ready.

The Trader Satriane swung out round the gas giant.  There!  There was our attacker.  The little ship had strayed only a few thousand kilometers from where we left it a hyperbola ago.

The telekin gasped.  His fingers worked in the gloves of the cybernetic sling.

Outside the Trader Satriane, twin magnetic barrels spun on their gymbals in total silence.  Diamond-laced chunks of composite sped from the barrels at velocities exceeding two thousand meters per second.  Destruction painted its way across our attacker’s hull a moment later.  Breathing gases and water erupted from the ship in frozen plumes.  Power arrays shredded like flowpaper.  Lights flickered and went out.  Bodies tumbled from the broken hull, grasping bits of wood and silk.  It was done in seconds.

Our sling-shot manuever whipped us toward the outer system.  I would not waste the momentum to return and obliterate them.  Not on secondary.  When the mains were restored, yes.  But not on secondary.  No, let us continue to limp away carefully and bind our wounds.

I could ill afford a sigh of relief, however, as my FO continued to watch me and my junior officers continued to watch him.  Mere survival is often not enough in our world.  Winning is what counts.

I sprang from the command seat and backhanded my FO with the ruby-studded glove which hid the scars on my right hand.  The young man dropped to one knee under the blow, a line of blood trickling from his lip.  But he looked up at me with what almost seemed relief.  His eyes then deferred to my boots.  I eyed the junior officers.  They moved quickly to oversee the repairs.

I settled into the command chair.  I looked at the mother-of pearl dials on the main control board.

Now to hold things for the next seven minutes.