Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Found: The Guilt of Concupiscence

Those who know me know that I love to find other peoples’ pictures (OPP); I probably have about 200 or so in my archive. I have no intention to send them to Davey Rothbart at Found Magazine, I don’t know how people do that. Most of my collection was found during the twelve years that Annabelle and I slinked the streets of Frostburg, Upper Marlboro, Fort Collins, Memphis, Albequerque, Yuma, Santa Maria, New Orleans, Ventura, and of course Richmond. For a find to be great, it must be acquired while walking, and for all of her life we took about three walks a day. We’d both sniff, but each for very different things. I’d find a picture and think that if it made sense (to speak in complete sentences to a dog) I’d tell her how I thought I was getting really good at knowing how to tell a wrapper from a picture, and how maybe, one day I’d get to teach a class on the finer points of discerning (from up to six feet) between a Ho-Ho wrapper board and a high school picture.

I’m going to start posting my finds here and am thrilled at the idea of sharing these images. These two items are my most recent finds. I found the porno pic on my bike ride to work as I was turning onto Granby from Floyd- it was folded up and all I could see was the color of white/pink flesh and a bit of the woman’s (?) eye. The color and quality was odd/bad enough that it made me turn around and pick it up- I figured it might have been made on someone’s desktop printer. I was surprised too see what it was, but not surprised to have found porn. I’ve found quite a bit of porn over the years (I passed up a stack of old Hustlers that were in a garbage can a little over a year ago, and the first find I ever kept was a porn magazine that my pal Jonathan and I found in the woods when we were in the fifth grade). I’d say that one of the reasons that porn is so easily found (or frequently discarded) is related to my second find of the day: it’s an old (classic?), weathered religious tract that tells the tale of a man on death row finding God (Life) while a lifer.

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