The Waste

For the first time since early March, today I left my own neighborhood; the transit trip also was the first for that since early March. With a backpack full of contingencies because my autistic brain hasn’t had to put this many resources into anything in all these months, I went to the second members-only Oregon Zoo day before they reopen to the general public. I am, however, defeated. Not just because the trip took everything I had, and I’ll be in downtime for the next two days because of it, but because almost every last one of the over six hundred photos I took is no better than an, “Eh, well I guess it will have to do.” And I don’t know why. Focus is off; everything is too noisy. And there’s no going back to try again—not with this much preparation and effort required, not with Oregon’s coronavirus patterns. Thing is, I need photos that satisfy me if to go at all requires this much effort of me. I can’t get by just on having gone, since my memories are so deficient. Getting a shot—even coming away with just one fucking shot that nails what I’d wanted from it—is the whole ballgame. And I didn’t. There’s not one shot that sticks the landing. It makes me want to break things. It makes me want to break all the things, because what was the point of going. What was the point of wasting every last thing I had in me for today, and most of what I’ll have in me for the next two days. Photos will be posted, and other people will like some of them, but I hate almost every last bit of them. They aren’t what I was after, and they leave me with nothing commensurate to the effort and expenditure of energy. I’m a fucking waste.