Blank Memoirs of the Man Canon Left Behind

I finally installed the software for my camera onto my computer, downloaded the pictures, loosely categorized them, blah blah blah. Many thinking "about time!", perhaps? Check these stats, for you photophiles awaiting pictures from my trip:
Months- 6
Countries- 9
Cities- 18
Pictures- 214 (with many being different perspectives of the same thing)
Excuses- Countless
Excuses deemed valid by most people from industrialized nations- 0, I think

To sum up why I didn't take so many pictures is because, while I met and had great times with plenty of people along the way, a la the journey of Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee, many of whom I still keep in touch with...I was technically traveling alone. All but like 3 of my pictures are of inanimate objects or animals...nothing worth really showing people.

Incidentally, since most of the pictures are of buildings and such, I had to do some FBI-esque forensic analysis to remember where some of them were. Example: zoom in on signs and try to figure out if the language on the sign is Polish or Czech.

Why didn't you take pictures of these people you met, dumbass? Ok, excuses, excuses. First of all, while my camera isn't the most cumbersome on the market, 007 would surely scoff at it. Nothing ruins a great social moment for me like whipping out the ole camera and waiting while one person (waiter, friend, innocent bystander) takes a picture with everyone's camera in the group. Or now that technology is catching up, we have the "Just send it to me so it can sit on my hard drive or e-mail inbox for the next 35 years..." method of banking on the responsibility of the owners of maybe one or two cameras to receive that Kodak moment. Not to mention the choreagraphed poses that hardly capture the true feeling of the situation.

So most of my pictures were actually taken because "that's just what people do", especially on vacation. And these days, it seems like every time you gather with more than 3 people, or see something you might talk about later (like when you went to that U2 concert and got a picture of Bono on your Razr from the upper deck of Giants Stadium), it's one of those occasions.

Look folks, if I can't remember someone I met, or something I did, then it/they probably wasn't important enough to me in the first place. If you want to know about anything I did or anyone I met, then I will be more than happy to tell you stories till the cows come home. To be honest, you seeing them in a photo won't give you any better idea of what they are like than my poetic words would, which flow off my tongue like paint, forming a picture in your mind clearer than any photo ever could. With my scatterbrain, the pictures tend to be more like Dali or Picasso than the old realists, but that's part of my charm.

If anyone else out there is as scared of the fact that technology is kidnapping our conversational and social skills and holding them without ransom, then please holla at a brotha. Man, in like 10 more years, can you imagine the percentage of people we regularly communicate with that we will actually see in the flesh more than once a year? E-friends. What's the next Facebook/My Space thing (and why is My Space so passe already anyway?)? How about a restaurant that has tables for one, with a monitor in the middle of it, where you can share a meal with someone via webcam? As ridiculous as it sounded to me as I thought of it just now, I guarantee something similar to that comes out between the time OJ goes to jail and gets released. Starbucks has already teamed up with Apple for the iPhone, so that shit's probably in the making as we speak...