Out Standing In My Field?
...well, okay, I can do that if the view is interesting...

Warning: This post is gonna wander all over the place...so take your dramamine before reading. And now, the text of this regularly scheduled blog, already in progress...

Amazing, how the mind can go from one image to another at the slightest provocation. Actually, tho, when my mind wanders like that, I actually realize I'm operating normally...or, at least, normally for me. Basically this posts consists of one photo, which conjured up a mental image, which in turn, conjured up another one, and that's what inspired my inclusion of the other two photos here. So, intelligence be damned, I'm gonna post this post, anyway. For, it's truly the result of some inspiration from a higher power. Or not. You be the judge...

A long time ago, early one morning when I was driving Taxi, I had to head north of town, to pick up someone at a rural address and haul them back into town. That's the setting. Now, I know next to nothing about farming, but I remember using those old rectangular bales of hay as the backing for archery targets, back when I used to shoot in an indoor archery league, some 30-odd years ago. (I told you this post was gonna wander...) Anyway, as my cab passed a hay field one early morning when the sun was just rising and the sky was a deep blue, with a little bit of mist along the ground here and there, I came upon an image something like this...



This was back about 9 or 10 years ago, and I had never seen Round Hay Bales before. And there they were, unto themselves, stretching off in the distance, and the first thot that came to mind is, "this looks kinda like a Pink Floyd Album Cover..." I was thinking about the stark images on that group's album covers, from the old stone factory warehouse on the cover of their "Animals" (1977) album, to the depiction of hundreds of hospital beds stretching into the distance along an ocean beach on the group's "Momentary Lapse Of Reason" (1987) album cover...



There is something stark and lonely, yet dignified and orderly, almost to the point of impersonalization, in an image like this. And that's how I felt about seeing those rows and rows of round hay bales, stretching off into the desolate distance. And that's how I feel about this album cover. (I read somewhere that the beds were all set up, and it began to rain...so the beds were all removed, and then reinstalled another day on the beach for the cover shoot.) Uh-oh, I'm wandering again...

Several years afterward (in '02), as I was heading down a highway near the Tri-Cities area in Washington State, all of a sudden I saw another view that struck me in the same way... a long row of strange objects strung along the ridge of a long, bare hilltop on a hot, scorching summer day; there they were...all clustered out there, in the sun's intense heat, just sitting there, and I'd never seen such a thing before. I found the view oddly compelling in a sort of forlorn, desolate way. Standing there, year after year, paying no attention to the elements, just mindlessly ekeing out the ages in some sort of endless quest...and this would've made a terrific Pink Floyd album cover, too...



This was the first time I'd ever seen a Wind Farm, only I didn't know that's what it WAS until about half-a-year later when I saw some TV program dealing with ecological issues. There they are, these monolithic windmills, reaching skyward and rotating silently as the whistling and gusting winds whirl through their constantly rotating blades. Well, rotating as long as the wind blows, that is. They oughta put these on the coast. It's ALWAYS windy here!

My inclusion of the above windmill photo came about due to something I saw in this next picture...the rows of "random symmetry", if you will, again appealed to me, and actually sparked off the idea for this rather strange post. The mind works in mysterious ways, for sure, but I look at it this way; I'm 53, so I'm glad my mind is functioning AT ALL. Using that twisted logic, perhaps one could think of this next image as a sort of miniature wind farm?


The amount of artistic license I've taken with this www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/hbo foto is almost illegal.
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Call it foolish, call it whimsical, call it dumb, call it whatever you want...but this, I feel, is one of my more inspired posts...and if nothing else, it sure was a lot of fun to write. And that's what this world needs. More Fun.