“All I got was a bag of rocks.”
- Charlie Brown

No Birdie, I haven’t found MyLuckyBreak; or rather MyLuckyBreak hasn’t found me. Not really.

Your question urged me to re-read my Mission. It was a splendid mission. It was full of pith and vinegar. It was strategic.

I don’t use “my Sweet Jellybean” anymore. The truth is she left my life before I started this project. That was my Great Big Secret. About this time last year, she extricated herself from my life. Um, maybe a week and a year ago. And I started off this project holding on to the idea of her. But she was already a ghost when I started. And this was, along with everything else, a love letter to a ghost. At least it started that way. I know she’s been told about SnappedShots. As far as I know she’s never read it. She didn’t want to be my muse when we were together. I’m convinced she wouldn’t want to be memorialized.

So I had it sorted out that my solution to the Right Place and Right Time problem was this project. But it didn’t work to the extent that I had hoped when I wrote out my Mission.

Oh, I did write letters to camera companies, Birdie. Canon. Kodak. Nikon. Fuji. Every picture here was taken with a seriously outmoded and outdone Fuji FinePix40i. Now I thought that would be great publicity for the Fuji people who are hardly competitive in the digital photography market. I wrote a letter telling them that that’s the way they should feel and I sent it to as many execs at Fuji that I could find. But it didn’t work. Fuji didn’t respond.

I interviewed myself a couple of months ago and sent that interview to blogging and lifestyle and arts magazines and even, brazenly, some dailies. But my bait was unbitten. My worm was not taken.

So, no, Birdie. I have not been gifted with free stuff. I did not recover my sweet jellybean. But I couldn’t have seduced her back with the thing that pushed her away. That was very much a mistake.

I did stay home. I did exile myself. I did take pictures of my dog, my kitchen sink, my stuffed animals, my bric a brac, silverware. I did not, so much as I can recall, take pictures of my paintings or my belly button lint.

So, if MyLuckyBreak is press or free stuff or light stands or solicitous models or a gallery exhibit or sponsorship, then no, MyLuckyBreak did not come.

But, Birdie, I’m also convinced that it has not been an unqualified failure either. I have readers and that is satisfying. And I have fine people like you stopping by to tell me it made them laugh or it made them happy or it made them think or that I had said something in a way that they had always wanted to say. And I’ve even had a fan buy a print. And I’ve even had a marriage proposal (OK it was the same person, but never mind that).

And it’s more than attention. And it was about attention, wasn’t it? But it was more than attention. It was always more than attention. I exorcised, or at least I mostly exorcised, my sweet jellybean. And I needed to do that. And I have, I hope, a sometimes charming, sometimes funny, sometimes preposterous, occasionally awful, almost always maniacal record, hmm, snapshot, of a year of my life.

And perhaps I didn’t get free stuff, perhaps I didn’t get sponsorship, perhaps I didn’t get the clamor of press, perhaps I didn’t dance on Ellen, but I will always have that.

Yes, Birdie, I fared better than Charlie Brown. Thank you.

SS