WorkSpaces

Apparently, one desk and laptop wasn't enough for me. So several years ago I became one of probably very few people who have two desks inside a small apartment. These workspaces comprise my "office".

The first desk holds my currently most capable and most used laptop and monitor along with a scanner and multiple external hard drives. A printer sits close by. This is where I spend ninety percent or more of my time and it is where I process photos, write essays, send emails, pay bills, watch videos, read articles on the Internet and listen to music.

The second desk and laptop is a back up. It contains an older laptop, monitor and additional external hard drives. The laptop is capable of most tasks but it is slower and that is the main reason it is used less often, but it can take over at any time it is needed.

The second desk became especially useful whenever a friend came over with his laptop and used my Wi-Fi connection. We were each able to work at the same time, except on different desks.

In truth, I own a third laptop/tablet for traveling but it runs a full desktop operating system, and a fourth laptop that refuses to die but which will soon be taken for recycling anyway and will mostly likely be replaced with new laptop which I tend to buy every four to five years. The business model of technology, unfortunately, is to render itself thoroughly obsolete after a short lifespan.

Through my laptop screens I absorb what is going on in the rest of the world involving many topics including science, geography, finance, health, travel, visual and performing arts, politics, religion, race and sexuality. Although I access the news and weather every day on my television and on my cell phone(s), each morning I read what is going on via my laptop when I visit websites such as the New York Times. I purchase items from Amazon, watch videos on YouTube, occasionally post on Twitter, check Facebook and glance at Instagram on my laptop.

If my desks could talk, they would reveal secrets about my life and my artistic as well as non-artistic activities that are not in any way alarming but nevertheless strong. My laptops would expose photographs and writings that most people have never seen. They are the vehicles that produce words and images that some people who think they know me would find very surprising, because those people don't actually know me at all except for my user-friendly photos of architecture, cityscapes, nature, sunsets and digitally altered images.

My laptops would allow people to discover pictures of me, my family, friends and people who have been a part of my life or passed through it. In my files they would discover published and unpublished works from the past involving urban life, youth, protests and demonstrations, political-social events, sports and recreation and travels and especially the quiet, non-public (i.e., not available through Google searches) websites that contain all this content in a form that has taken years to construct. They would see the biographies I have written as well as my own autobiography in more than one journal. And especially, they would see the portraits and artistic nudes I have taken of myself and other people that I consider some of my most beautiful or fascinating work.

My workspaces are where my mind and body engage with all my creativity and where, to a large extent on more than one level, I reach a good portion of my fulfillment. But every day, I also push away from my screens and leave my apartment, as I interact with the world on its own terms as well.

Desk 2

Harlem

Manhattan

February 2018