September 11th, 2022 - 12:20 to 6:45 pm - Santa Cruz, CA
Documented here is a pleasant if relatively uneventful trip myself and a few friends took to visit the UC Santa Cruz campus and Its Beach. There are also a few shots of Toa Nuju Metru, who I gleefully posed feet in the sand like a warrior rising from the dunes. Here I am reduced to an infantile state, stuffing toys in my pockets to carry with me in case I get bored on long trips, occasionally setting them down in dirt or pavement to capture my imagination in a photograph. My friends laugh at me now and humor the very unadult thing I’m doing, assuming there is some quirky or semi-ironic twist to this behavior that makes it acceptable. Little do they know that I desire deeply to reignite the uninhibited, raw energy of story-telling that I held in childhood; when now I place my toys in the sand and only feel embarrassed, and my imagination is dulled, cauterized, and neutered.
I had a dream where I sat on the floor of my first childhood room. I was the age that I am now, and the door was shut. Beyond my lap was strewn a massive assortment of toys formed into a chaotic battle arrangement just as I had loved to create as a kid. In those days, when the lore of my Lego was extensive, I would reenact intense collisions of opposing forces in battles that surged in momentum. There were small victories and an encroaching defeat that nearly overwhelmed our heroes before a sudden eucatastrophe would rescue them from the jaws of death. Here in the dream, I was an adult replaying these childish scenarios, moving my toys about, and straining my voice as I spit profusely for the desired sound design: implosions, explosions, quick breaths of silence before eruption, cries of soldiers in pain, the yell of a charge. But in reliving my childhood play, I felt no sort of liberation, only a shameful temptation that I was indulging. Every moment of play I felt that I should stop, that I was unraveling, that it was unbecoming of me. I was losing myself, drunk in some sort of sin that overwhelmed and dulled my inhibitions. I was enthralled in the play, but my eyes glazed over as I swung spaceships about in the sky like I was sleepwalking. At some point, I reached a climax and collapsed with my toys on the floor. Some unidentifiable figure stood at the door, and I remembered myself and my embarrassment, though it was not so much that I felt ashamed. Rather, I was resigned to my adulthood, knowing that whatever fun I had just experienced was not the equivalent to the passion I carried as a child, and that I had best leave it be.
This dream came to me only a few days ago despite these photographs being over a year old as of writing, but I thought these things then as I do now. Then it was buried in hidden, subconscious corners.