Smoking
I've made a few mistakes, if you will, taking pictures with the new camera. Mostly, I can see them in the little viewer on the back and re-shoot, but some of the blurry ones slip through. Some of them are good mistakes though. Mostly it's when I'm shooting directly into a light source of some kind and I get shadows or halos. This picture is an example of what I consider to be a good mistake.
A, is another of the smoking crew here at Deadwood. She is classic bohemian, studied Edgar Cayce and astrology (though not a big fan of Crowley and/or the Golden Dawn) and was probably quite the chippie in her heyday. You can smell Beat Poet. She is so soft spoken, (as are many others here) that you have to lean in to hear what she's saying. She's a bit of a loner, and a little sad. She's on dialysis three times a week and is waiting for a new kidney. The trouble is that she smokes.
The deal with organ tranpslants is that if you are seen as practicing a risky lifestyle, you drop down the list. When she first got to Deadwood she was desperately trying to quit smoking by lighting one, taking two drags and stuffing it out. She would go through half a dozen cigs in about five minutes and get up and leave. The other residents were baffled at first by this un-seeming behavior, and collected the slightly puffed stogies in a plastic bag, until a smoke deprived and not-so-picky resident started taking them and firing them up.
A seems to have resigned herself to the fact that here, smoking is about the only adult diversion available; and she gets to socialize with some of the more interesting folks about. She's smoking like a human now, she stays to chat, and she's exchanged the skittish, wide-eyed withdrawal look with her more natural easy-going bongo-tapping personae. But you can see it in her face that she knows that she's dropping further down the list with every drag.
