Gray wet ash day. I walk down to the photo place with no coat on, letting it all soak in. A balding gray heavyset man is sitting in a car on my block, looking every bit the private detective waiting for his chance to snap the adultery pix and go home. Rounding the corner at U Street, I nearly step in puke on the sidewalk. A few steps on, more vomit, glazed white on the wet pavement, dispersed a little by drainage. Aftermath of a someone's perfect evening, a pinnacle instant of emptying, void and oblivion.

At the photo place I pick up a contact sheet from a roll of film I found in a box while unpacking. The images are blurred and light-scarred, but I can make out my own face in washed-out black & white. I look to be about fifteen years old. I have no memory of when these photos were taken. Somehow this roll of undeveloped film has been riding around with me for over a decade, surviving changes of state and nation.

In cyst form, bacteria can cling to life almost indefinitely. New research suggests that they may even be able to withstand the harsh, irradiated vacuum of outer space.

Other pictures on the roll are hard to make out. Peering at them I have the vague impression I may have pressed the shutter in the instant they were committed to film. I'm not really sure. A peeling wall with graffiti that says "TV". An old man sitting on a suitcase beside a freight yard. Kind of an amateurish picture, influenced by my early FSA photographic sensibilities. I bore down on the negative with the loupe and start to like the photo again. The old man is haloed by the cat-silhouette logo of the Chessie System freight car behind him. His head is cocked slightly towards me, but I can't tell from the negative whether he's actually looking at me or not.

I'd like to go to the open darkroom at Glen Echo some night and print this picture. Finish what I started so long ago. And I bought more film for comparison purposes. Let's see if my artistic vision has matured.

Basically all you have to do to be a good photographer and get your images on calendars and other arbiters of artistic goodness is buy a roll of infrared film and shoot it with a red filter. Skies turn sweeping black, grass and leaves glow unearthly pale. You'll be amazed at the results. I've done it when I felt like a wash-up, and it was very reassuring. Just a little twist of vision can be all it takes to get you into the realm of the artists.

I think many of my creative efforts use the kind of quantity-oriented strategy applied by pharmaceutical companies in their development of new drugs: a feverish and diverse genetic-recombinative effort to produce a truckload of failures and a handful of mutant results worth keeping alive. I'll work simultaneously on eight different paintings, ripping apart the wet flesh of the failures to incorporate into the fabric of the surviving members of the brood. But it's silly to talk about painting right now, because I haven't painted in a good long while. My last sculptural effort, a reliquary to hold my baby teeth, fell apart. I don't have enough human hair yet for another little thing I'd like to do.

That unopened roll of film is like a big kid on the playground taunting me. Sad day when you have to prove yourself to a photosensitive strip of plastic.