How to Photograph a Tree

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Every month, I receive a medical bill at my address for someone named Craig.

I don’t know anyone named Craig. He must have been the previous tenant, so I assumed the statements would stop after about a month of moving in.

A month later, a new bill arrived, so I tried finding Craig online. He either keeps a low profile, or has no profile at all. Nothing else I could do at this point, so I wrote “RTS” on the envelope and dropped it in the mailbox.

Two years have passed since the first bill, and I still receive the new one on the first Wednesday of every month. It’s become a tradition.

I log off from my day job.

I walk to the mailbox.

Craig’s statement is there.

I walk back to my apartment because I forgot to bring the RTS pen, even though earlier in the day I said to myself that I wouldn’t forget it.

I walk back to the mailbox, certain that the sender will just shred the letter the moment it arrives back at their office.

I drop it off in the outbound box.

My little cycle is complete for another month. Maybe one of these times Sisyphus will see it and give my hair a tussle and say “Keep it up champ, we all start somewhere”, while giving me his autograph. I wonder if I could get his autograph? After all, I did go back and get the pen.

On the (second) walk back from the mailbox, that ambient guilt which comes from unavoidable wasteful behavior creeped back in like staticky fog. How many sheets of paper are wasted every time this happens? This can’t be that bad in the long run, can it? Oh… but how many people out there probably think the same thing when they get pulled into their own versions of this? And on and on…

What is the “right” relationship to have with garbage? Out-of-site-out-of-mind doesn’t seem right. I can no longer see the rock I put a mean knuckle-curve on when I threw it off my balcony, therefore it’s not my concern if a jogger catches it with their teeth.

Not everyone is willing or able to become their own supply chain manager either, so the outcome we live in now is a balancing act between a hundred different groups on one super-sized seesaw. Some want garbage a certain way, others oppose that way, and some don’t care either way as long as the dump truck isn’t late to pick up their cans.

Trees don’t get to come into the house, wood does. So does paper. Both are here on a temp basis, and then they exit as garbage. We send each other future garbage. We use the wooden future garbage to hold the paper future garbage we send to each other. When the future garbage is realized as actual garbage, out it goes. Is this still consumption or am I just giving my living room chewing gum in the form of a coffee table?

I put the RTS pen back on my desk. On my good days, I feel different than today. Today, I feel stuck in the belief that the oldest and largest trees out there have escaped coffeetableization simply because they don’t yield the right type of wood. I’m photographing untapped resources that haven’t found their “true” value.

They’re survivors of a system, yet victims of the world in which they remain.

Thanks Craig.

Thank you for your time.

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