This is a very personal image.

This is the shot where I realized I was getting dangerously close to crossing over the fine line into stark raving insanity... with no chance of ever turning back again.

Please try to understand. In a place like Fredericksburg, Texas... a guy like me attracts a lot of attention. This in turn makes me very self-conscious... which in turn, effects my ability to express myself effectively. In other words... I have difficulty capturing what I see if people who do not understand are watching and drawing conclusions on the limited information afforded solely by their own situation or circumstance.

So there it was, eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning and I'm wandering through downtown Fredericksburg like the “Rain Man”... clutching my camera to my chest. Fearful of dropping my best working eye... muttering under my breath... giving Mary yet another valuable piece of my mind:

“Definitely! Definitely! The People's Court! Judge Whopner at four! K-Mart sucks!”

Trying desperately to heal my tattered soul without any of the proper answers… trying to sew my heart back together with bailing wire and a rusty crochet hook. Scanning the heavy traffic for openings... preferring the heavily traffic-burnished covers... because of the way the light reflects... and the covers wear so delicately. Because I know they'll be the best shots! Waiting for the curious children to get bored with me and wander off.

I try to avoid the dutiful "whipped" husbands sitting outside the trendy shops there... waiting on their wives... holding their purses... trying casually to manage their children as they talk about sports... or bull breeding... or what Dell stock is doing these days… with identical carbon copies of themselves. They watch me dodge traffic as they tamp down their Copenhagen cans... loading their lower lips... watching the idiot tourist from back east... the one in the squashed and weathered cowboy hat wandering up Main Street. He’s obviously NOT a "real" Texan... they are so smug in their Neo-Texan self righteousness, only recently purchased, on sale, at Town Center Mall in Austin. They sit there, the nuevo riche of Texas, with their noses in the air and their tea-sip fingers out, watching their over-privilged children taunt the retard taking meaningless snapshots of the sidewalk.

They don't have a clue... who I am. Where I came from. Where I have been... what I have seen... what I have learned... what I know or who I know!

A venerated native Texan, with the name to prove it. A third generation Aggie with a ring forged in the fires of hell, from the remains of my mother's dirt-farmer brother. A land holder in the Navasota valley. A four time climber of the scared Gaudalupe Peak. A exile of the Houston megatropolis. A world traveler... a native son returning home.

They are without a clue!

Not everything is… as it appears at first glance.