NEW RULES:

When I pay a hella lot of money THAT YOU BARELY NEGOTIATE ON to buy a sexy new Kia Forte 2020 from you [JUST LOOK AT THIS SEXY INTERIOR! CAN YOU BLAME ME FOR BUYING IT? NO, YOU CAN'T.], you owe me two things:

1. A bag to put all the stuff from my old car in when I do a final sweep of its contents. Seriously. Why isn't this a standard thing you do when you sell a car? I can't be the first person ever who needed a small bag for the crap in my glove compartment when I traded in my old car for a new one from you.

2. A final sweep of your own through my old car to find things I overlooked. Like my damn garage-door opener. Seriously. Why isn't this a standard thing you do when you sell a car? I can't be the first person ever who accidentally left a garage-door opener in my old car when I traded it in for a new one from you. And now you have to wait around tonight for me to pick it up after work. How is this efficient for either of us?

BUT LOOK AT THIS SEXY INTERIOR, PEOPLE! I WOULD NEVER LEAVE THIS CAR IF I DIDN'T HAVE TO GO TO WORK ON OCCASION TO PAY FOR IT.

Look at this pretty tree!

WAIT—is that my awesome new car under it? How on earth did it get in this photo? DID I MENTION I HAVE AN AWESOME NEW CAR?

I think I might have just gotten a weird haircut

But hey—the moon sure is bright tonight.

Oh, look!

Jake took another artsy-wannabe picture of the moon with his iPhone!

I bet he posts it on his blog next.

Do we pose ourselves artistically and look adorable atop the piano when there ISN’T a ratty old book ruining the composition for a photo?

No. We wait for a ratty old book to ruin the composition for any potential photos and THEN pose ourselves artistically and look adorable atop the piano.

I took this a couple nights ago and forgot to post it

Please pretend it’s a photo of tonight’s full moon so I don’t have to go back outside and take more pictures.

IT. IS. TIME. (Though. It. Is. Still. Not. Totally. Done.)

But the clutter is cleared (read: pushed up against the walls) and the bed is made and the red throw pillows are pilfered from the couch to mask how wrinkly the pillowcases are but don’t for a second believe that I’m a bed-throw-pillow kind of gay because NO and the photo is artfully composed and cropped and edited and I’M SLEEPING IN MY OWN BED TONIGHT!

Apparently I have an alert fan

1. Bitch Kitty heard my car pull up tonight and stood in rapt attention like this until I came in the door!
2. Mom took this artfully composed, figure-flattering photo to document the event.
3. THEN! BITCH! KITTY! SAT! NEXT! TO! ME! AND! LET! ME! PET! HER!
4. For about 34 seconds.
5. Mom also documented this event with a number of photos.
6. But I looked fat in every one of them so they are wisely not seeing the harsh backlit light of technology.
7. But still ...
8. PROGRESS!

Nighttime NewBo Coolness

Swear not

When the moon is really quite breathtaking and even though you’re tired and want to go to bed you wander up and down the street taking a bunch of pictures to make sure you get one that does it justice:

BUT WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED ON THIS SHOT? It looks like melted ghosts ...

So four years ago this happened

Then it didn't happen; I ended up leaving what was to be my third production of A Chorus Line because I was a foggy, unreliable, barely functional, poorly medicated bipolar mess who was a drag on rehearsals and an admitted liability to the production. I was heartbroken. But I still got to keep this awesome photo. Which I truly cherish.

A waning gibbous (according to Siri) moon over the north entrance to the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. 11:30 pm.

My Fair Lady backstage selfie!

Tree what I did there?

So this time it was Scott’s turn to blow off our morning run—which was SO AWESOME and it’s TOO BAD HE MISSED IT because we RODE MAGICAL UNICORNS THE WHOLE WAY as we FEASTED ON THE AMBROSIA OF THE GODS and OTHER FANCIFUL STUFF—so Rob and I replaced him—and PUT HIM IN THE MIDDLE YOU’RE WELCOME—with this scraggly-ass tree for our post-run selfie, but the tree ended up looking pretty lush and majestic in the photo which is totally my fault because of my prodigious and intimidating photography talents don’t blame me I can’t help it.

In the course of our small talk as Rob and I were rocking our 10:56 pace though, I stumbled on what I think is an awesome idea for a submission to Theatre Cedar Rapids’ Underground New Play Festival. I’ve wanted to enter something for the competition, but I had no idea what to write about and I also have zero experience writing things that come from just my imagination; everything I’ve ever written has at the very least had its foundation in describing or reporting on something that already exists. Plus Rob—who has written countless and brilliant plays ONE OF WHICH WAS TURNED INTO A BIG HOLLYWOOD MOVIE WITH BIG HOLLYWOOD STARS—thinks my idea is a good one. Which gives me huge amounts of confidence that I can do this ... and hopefully do it well. So WATCH OUT HOLLYWOOD I’M COMING TO DOMINATE YOU and I’m RIDING A MAGICAL UNICORN THE WHOLE WAY.

The sun over rural Calmar is a brilliant, gorgeous red

But it's unfortunately not photographing in that color using my iPhone through a car window as we race down the highway at 57 miles an hour:

Six miles! Gorgeous day!

And I’ve decided I’m on a mission to photograph every lion sculpture in Cedar Rapids. (I’m discovering there are A LOT. But I’ve taken pictures of a pretty good purrcent of them.)

Since our long weekend runs start and end in the Czech Village Concrete Lion Reserve, I’ve wandered around the area and pawsed this morning to add to my lion collection.

Naturally, the boys have no lives so they tagged along with me on my prowl.

Our adventure has taken us to the center of Cedar Rapids’ iconic Lion Bridge, where we sit right meow as I compose this Pulitzer narrative:

Rob, as usual, has been a paragon of pride and restraint. Scott, as usual, is making a damn fool of himself in our tail.

I swear I’m just getting amazinger and amazinger at photography—especially artistic portraiture

To wit: the exquisite composition and compelling narrative of this group selfie that I took just this morning after our run:

I call it The Beatitude of St. Rob, and it truly rivals the Renaissance masters in the way it frames Rob—representing the Cedar Rapidian god Guy With The Newest Running Shoes—between the verdant fecundity of the trees as he’s flanked by his noble warrior Me and his also-noble-but-in-the-background-so-as-not-to-pull-focus-from-me warrior Scott as we depict the noble warrior mementos mori of Oh My God I’m Dying Because It’s So Muggy and Oh My God I’m Dying Because I’m So Sweaty. The rooftop in the background is, of course, a metaphor for the ethereal certitude that there’s a house behind us and it has a roof, while the three figures in the foreground are mathematically equivalent to the three miles we just finished running. Renaissance masters dig representational stuff like that.

Please do not reproduce and sell this image, as its copyrighted and I’ll make snide comments about your wardrobe choices on Facebook if you do. And watch for the next in my series of Renaissance Masters Artistic Portraiture By Jake(R) on Wednesday, where we’re going to force Scott to be in the foreground for once.

Well now I know where I got my fascination for walking around the city taking pictures of architectural geometries and dramatic perspectives and stark contrasts between shadow and light:

I just saw West Side Story on the big screen for the first time, and it is BRILLIANT cinema--and a lush visual poem of color and movement and shape and pattern that I never fully appreciated from my endless viewings on a TV screen. I grew up devouring the movie soundtrack and I’ve known every word and note and phrase and nuance of Leonard Bernstein’s score and Stephen Sondheim’s libretto for as long as I can remember. I’d assumed I’d spend my first big-screen viewing obsessing over Jerome Robbins’ choreography and staging, but instead I kept examining every camera angle and forced perspective and texture and shadowing and gang-specific palette of Robert Wise’s cinematography. And now I have the final piece of the puzzle for my full love of and artistic respect for this movie.

OK, well not the FINAL final piece of the puzzle; the final final piece may or may not (which totally means does) revolve (literally!) around the ... um ... globe-like butts of the dancers, which also can be fully appreciated only on the big screen.

Anyway, here are some non-butt-related examples of the photos I've taken as I've wandered around Cedar Rapids not realizing I was pretending to be Robert Wise:

CedaRound: Iowa coolness on a Thursday evening

Swear not by the clouds, the inconstant clouds ...

So the moon was shining through this amorphous, stunningly dimensional opening in the clouds tonight while I was pouring a bottle of long-expired store-brand mango-pear-flavored sparkling water in the yew by the garage (because if I poured it directly on the ground it would splash on my shoe by the garage) so I could recycle the bottle to protect the environment but by the time I put the bottle down and got my phone out and turned off the flash because everyone knows you can’t photograph the night sky with your flash on the amorphous opening had morphed into something less stunningly dimensional and less moon-shine-throughy but I had my phone out and my flash turned off anyway because again everyone knows you can’t photograph the night sky with your flash on so I tried to artfully frame the rapidly disappearing amorphous hole of stunning moonlight between some handy nearby treetops and I took the picture anyway and it’s not great or artistic or even remotely as beautiful as the shining, amorphous, stunningly dimensional celestial event I saw in the sky in the first place but despite my rush to get out my phone and turn off my flash because as I’ve said repeatedly now everyone knows you can’t photograph the night sky with your flash on I didn’t get even a drop of long-expired store-brand mango-pear-flavored sparking water splashed on my shoe by the yew so I count the entire sequence of events as both an artistic and an environmental win.