The Perfect and The Good

Home is a fever of overthinking.

Perfectionism can kill you. Completionism can make you miserable. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Trying to figure everything out ahead of time can also make you crazy. Gibson Guitar used to have a banner logo on the peghead, back in the 1940s, that said “When Only A Gibson Is Good Enough.” And another company - was it Guild? - put out an ad saying “When good enough isn’t good enough.” And, indeed, I want anything I do to be as good as it can be, but there is a point of diminishing returns, when the time spent making something perfect is not worth whatever improvements you can bring. When the cost of trivial improvement is not worth it.

I keep editing photos, partly because I want to present the best 300 or so photos that I can on this subject, partly because I actually enjoy culling, choosing and editing photos. Partly because I want to make sure I’m giving it my best shot. When I first put this together - over two years ago - I collected most of my edited photos on the subject, then spent another month going through the unedited ones, then came home from Florida and let the project go fallow for a while. I let it cool down and almost sloughed it off to the permanent back burner. Procrastination can also kill you, trust me.

When I picked it up again last winter, I made real progress - I got all the photos laid out on in book form and did color correction - but then I had to drop this project while we picked up everything and hauled ass to Kansas for an emergency. Four months of road trips followed in the service of that situation and I’m now putting pressure on myself to finish so that I can move on to the next project. Does every project have to reach the point of, “let me finish this fucking thing” before I actually finish the fucking thing?

But I keep culling photos. I edit each one - from the raw photo to one that I can use in published form - then I put it in the main folder for the book, then I keep indexing the existing photos, which is taking more time than you’d think. Then I will look at each page and, if something is not right, I’ll swipe a photo out for one of the new ones and stare at the two-page layout for a while.

What’s guiding my method for laying out the page spreads? Some of it is aesthetic - the way that four photos interact with each other. A bit may be related to content, but mainly it’s a feeling in my gut about how they go together. It’s a mood as much as anything else, not something I can verbalize. And it could be that I need to trust the proverbial fucking process and just keep doing what I’m doing. It is moving steadily in the right direction, after all.

It’s pointless to talk about the book’s subject yet. “Pointless” and “beside the point” are almost the same thing. And this begs the question, “what is the point?” Not of this book - I have a very simple premise for THAT. I don’t want to announce it yet, but there’s no good reason for that decision. I’ll get to that soon enough. Does something need a reason? Sometimes, we do things in order to not be crazy. This book is a way of making sense of an obsession, a particular subject, but it’s simply something I do, not something I think about.  It’s taking me a while and I’ll talk about the subject some other time. Am I superstitious? Who cares? I am anxious, though.

My significant other and I keep talking about where we might move. Old Greenwich Village has changed for the worse - too many e-Bikes, too many young and rich people who don’t say hello, too many gangs of tourists, too many great bakeries, goddamnit. We keep talking about it and taking little trips to potential places all over the Tri-State area, but that constant thinking has begun to take its toll on me, as well.

Do you ever get to the point where you just can’t think about something anymore? That’s where I am on this future move. I start to think about process. That, maybe, it would better to figure out what we’re going to do and let that guide us, rather than what’s the best place to move to and then to figure out what we’ll do. This sounds nuts. It may not be nuts, but it’s making me nuts. As I have written before, ad infinitum and ad nauseam, this has been going on for a while and I’m not the only one I know who has this brand of crazy. I run into other Villagers who are similarly sick of this place, but have no idea where to go.

Money is part of it - life elsewhere would be cheaper. Bad life decisions could be part of it, not planning things out the way all of these young, rich and seemingly miserable new neighbors of mine are doing. But that’s all bullshit. I have had a good run here and, in fact, value the consistency of my life here. I have always wanted to pick up and move. I have always been restless.

Previously, for the past 30 years, that would have meant a move out west, but the space where the west lives in my imagination has changed. It took me this long - decades - to really value the Northeast.  I didn’t think there was a process to this decision, but I can see that in hindsight. I had to travel a quarter million miles before I could know that I liked it here. “You’ll find your happiness lies right under your eyes, back in your own backyard.”

Unless it’s not your backyard anymore. In which case, you pull out the charts and trim the sails and say, “what the fuck do we do next?”

So we keep looking, trying to tick off all the boxes of location, money, price, and feel. And this is not a case of perfectionism or completionism by any means, but the search has begun to make me crazy. And maybe that’s good for the book, although even I - the king of drawing tenuous connections - cannot come up with a good link there. I am working fitfully, not enough each day, and part of the reason is that I have less peace of mind than I otherwise might have.

Then again, is peace of mind, whatever that is, overrated? I don’t know. I DO like routine and have learned that it’s important for getting my work done. That’s one reason I have gone to Florida for a few weeks each of the past few winters - no distractions. I can get work done down there, far from the comforts of home.

Home may just be a place where I take care of stuff, my comfortable rut filled with books. It’s not so comfortable, though, when you keep trying to think of a new place you can call home. Home is a fever of overthinking. And this book has become an anthill - a beautiful anthill that I keep trying to perfect each day with better and better photos. But maybe the perfect is, as the saying goes, “the enemy of the good,” and maybe I need to apply that liberating phrase, a phrase I began to use a few winters ago, when I was working on another book down in sunny Florida - “it’s good enough.”

I’m not sure I can apply that phrase to the current search for a new place to live, but I may have to sit with the feelings of unease that accompany this search, the pit-of-my-stomach tenderness that hits late at night when I wake up from another vivid dream brought on by self-inflicted instability. Maybe I have to let it all play out and keep showing up for the weird road trips in search of someplace that feels right. I don’t know.

I do know that I am not taking enough photos lately. Been too busy. And that’s not good. Too much daylight, damn it, and too many bakeries and errands and other stuff. Old Harry, when I used to complain about the neighborhood, used to say, “We need more crime.” I don’t agree with him, but I nod to his argument.

Maybe I need more calm. Maybe I need to play with the hound. Maybe I need some more baked goods. Maybe I need to chill the fuck out, enjoy the day, and just do another little bit. Most prison breaks take a lot of work, but in tiny amounts. You can only file so much off the bars each night, dig so much of the tunnel before you have to get back to sleep. I need to be patient.