St. Valentine at his best
It’s a rerun, but it also amuses me greatly.
The backstory, in its era, is even more fun.
It was a desultory gig in Midland-Odessa. Rode out from Austin on Friday night and was forced to spend a few hours with an ex-lover. Weird energy in and of itself, and I’m guessing, late January, early February.
The image itself was taken with a Palm Pilot derivative, a camera that snapped into a device called a Handspring, I think.
Cell phone pictures before there were iPhone and cell phones that could take pictures. Technically, it wasn’t that much. For entertainment, though, it showed a side of the country that existed, then, but has largely been subsumed by correctness and political expediency.
At the time of the image, though I did prowl certain pawn shops, looking for used wedding bands. It was a joke, and yet, also held a kind of usefulness in my work, when I was more in the public eye.
The image, I’m grateful to an old fishing buddy for finding it, and now, that image has served well, over the years, evergreen, as a reminder of a time and place, and the way it was, and the humor we all shared, then.
If I were more enterprising, I would just recycle images from the sign for the tiny hamlet of Valentine, Texas — maybe a few short minutes west of Marfa, now world-famous. Doing so though, doesn’t serve with the singular image, possibly pre-millennial, that captures so much about a spirit, now sadly departed.
St. Valentine at his best
#Valentine