Question Everything

I have a rule, one that makes perfect sense to me: if a person has more than five bumper stickers on the back of his or her car, that person should be questioned by the appropriate authorities. Over the years, I’ve made revisions to this rule: for instance, flags count as two bumper stickers, depictions of sports teams count as half a bumper sticker each, and bumper stickers that are unreadable or offensive count as three. If you have a bumper sticker that declares your love for a dog, this does not count toward your total, but if you have one that says “I love my Granddogs,” society should step in. All this to say, I really, really hate bumper stickers.

Question Everything is one of those bumper sticker slogans that’s been around for years, and I must admit, in the past, every time I saw it, I could feel a bit of anger rising up inside me and the knee-jerk thought, You don’t tell me what to do. It’s a confrontational statement whether it wants to be or not, and as a bumper sticker it frankly sucks, because no one really wants to question everything, unless you’re on the Schuykill Expressway during rush hour. And anyway, there’s too much at stake to question everything, so what’s the point?

The point is, we don’t always know what we’re seeing. The image above is a great example: when you first look at it, you might think this is a painting or even a piece of digital artwork, but the more you scan it, the more you see, especially when you reach the lower right-hand corner of the image, you realize that this is a photograph. I took it on what would have seemed like an ugly morning at the beach. No sun, rain, only a sliver of light at the horizon.

I started thinking about this when I took a look at this blog. It’s not a great thing to admit, but until my last post, I hadn’t written anything in this space for six years, and there’s a number of different excuses I could have and would have come up with for that. I’m not traveling as much, so I don’t have that many sign pictures anymore. My job is going well, so I don’t feel the need to express myself that much. Nobody wants to read about what I’m doing during COVID because they’re all out there writing about what they’re doing during COVID. In this era of divisiveness, can anyone write anything, no matter how innocent, without it being misconstrued? And that old stand-by, I’m waiting for inspiration.

Anybody has been in any sort of creative endeavor knows this phrase, uses this phrase, or lives by this phrase. It’s convenient to throw out there when you’re stuck, it sounds good to those we know and love around us, and it makes us feel good when we know what we’re really doing. Chickening out is such an ugly phrase after all, so why not go with something elegant like I’m anticipating the arrival of the muse, don’t touch me! For she shall dip her finger in the River Styx and touch my lips with life-giving silver-toned elixir, that I shall present to the world a work of such dazzling excellence, one cannot look directly at it without turning to stone! In the end, of course, this is nothing but an excuse.

This is what I’ve been questioning lately. The necessity of this excuse.

If I’m out there doing it instead of just talking about it, I won’t need this excuse at all.

Recently I went through my pictures looking for images of the fall or winter, and I noticed something disturbing. I really didn’t have any. I’m one of those terrible people who carries his camera everywhere, and I find myself coming home, having not taken a picture of anything, and that’s disturbing to me in and of itself, but I realized that I hardly ever take any pictures when the weather is bad, or if it’s raining, or snowing, or anything apart from it being sunny and nice outside. All my unplanned images seemed to be in clusters, centered around an event or a place, and nothing straying much from that. When I look back, though, at the times when I was just hit by something in the moment, or when weather was off or lighting wasn’t perfect, that’s when some magic happens.

I took this one night in 2022 when I was waiting for Laura to get her hair cut.

I’ve always liked this as an example of the attitude I need more of. I’ve posted it before, but after the past few years, this picture takes on more meaning. First, I drove right past the diner and said to myself I should really capture this moment, and didn’t, but then I thought of the opportunity I was missing and drove back out in the storm to fire off about ten shots before it got too dark. Second, the Queen City Diner, unfortunately, was one of the first casualties of the COVID era, and this spot is now a car lot, so this moment, now matter how hard I try, could not be recreated.

A few weeks ago, we made our way out to Mitsuwa Market in Edgewater, New Jersey, right across the river from the City. I brought my camera of course, with very little intentions of actually using it, and it sat in the car as we gorged ourselves on Black Sesame ice cream. Side note: it sounds weird, but trust me, this is something that should be eaten, and often. We were just about on our way out, and we were walking along the river, when we spotted a shopping cart washed up on the bank of the river. Inspiration had arrived, for certain, but I started to make excuses: we’re-just-about-to-go-and-it’s-a-long-drive-back-to-Allentown-and-who-cares-if-I-take-a-picture-of-this-and-will-it-even-be-good-and-blah-blah-blah-yak-yak-yak-talk-a-little-peck-a-little-cheep-cheep-cheep.

Even as I’m writing this, I’m mentally telling myself to shut up.

More and more, the phrase Question Everything becomes less scary, possibly even comforting, because it seems to me that it’s something we have to do anyway, eventually. Question why you don’t do the things you want to do, question the lies you’ve been told about yourself, question your fears, question the things you’ve believed for years, even question your dreams. Yes, it’s confrontational, but if it helps us shed the terrible things in life and helps us hold on to the good, it’s what we need, it’s what we crave.

But if it’s all the same, I’m not slapping it on the back of my Toyota.