rainymacros13, originally uploaded by visualkaos.

Funny, I never used to like green.
I don’t know how this could have happened. I like to think that I’m in tune with the Earth. And although the atmosphere of our planet is something like 75% nitrogen, which is basically blue, some people just equate green with Earth.
Some even refer to it as a green planet.
Planetary tourists and other first time visitors to Earth would be overwhelmed by it’s blueness on approach. This is particularly true of immigrants coming here from places that are dominated by hues in other positions on the color wheel.
For example, Martians would get a chill down their spine, provided thay had a spine, when getting their first glimpse of the brisk tones rushing up toward them as they approached Earth’s stratosphere.
Mars’ atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide.
Nasty stuff. Think about the view from the Sepulveda Pass looking toward the westside on a hot summer day — in 1969.
Co2 makes for a not-so-lovely rusty melancholy.
And as Elton John once said, ‘Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.’
It’s clearly not alone in this category but green, is an earth tone.
Nothing is green on Mars.
But there is lots of green on Earth.
Chlorophyll for one.
I once owned a key lime martini green van but that’s another story.
I have at least 3-4 different tones of green shirts hanging in my closet. I don’t own a single green T-shirt, even though I prefer to wear T-shirts over ones with collars.
I love nearly every kind of green food, although I don’t consume nearly enough of it.
I’ve been trying to convince Linda for years that she should color at least some of her hair green.
But when I became a photographer and a designer, I avoided green.
This is not to say that I preferred primary colors in my photographs or typography or whatever.
I always loved Earth tones.
They are my colors.
But I would never use green. Green just seemed icky to me.
Cold and forbidding green, I thought, was just unfriendly.
When Linda came along I learned that her favorite color, the color that she looks best in, the color of the majority of her clothes, food and the color that always seems to show in designs she’s done, is green.
Soon, I began to see the light.
With a wavelength roughly 520–570 nanometres it sits, big as shit, smack in the middle of the visible color spectrum, I should have noticed it before!
I started experimenting with it. Just some nice, safe dark, grass greens at first moving on to more kelly greens and eventually finding appreciation for the likes of … sea foam.
I know, it’s crazy.
Now I use it almost every day. I put it in my photos, typography and meals.
I’m calmed by it now and I couldn’t be happier.
I like an olive color mixed with a burnt orange.
I also like olives but not burnt oranges.
I have Linda to thank for turning me on to green.

mirror2, originally uploaded by visualkaos.

Sometime around 1:30 a.m. last night — OK, this morning — I laid in bed, awake.
I had fallen asleep easily enough, early in fact. Before going to bed I had two healthy doses of Jameson which effectively landed me horizontal before 11 o’clock. But as it often happens when I drink, I fall asleep quickly but not deeply.
Soon enough, I was awakened by the sound of purring in my ear
Nighttime kitty. Needs petting.
After some stroking was given to one of our three attention-starved pets, the one who sleeps with us every night, I stared at the popcorn ceiling for a while and realized that it seemed pretty light in the room for 1:30 a.m.
I sat up in bed.
It was quiet. Peaceful, save for the droning of a grey and white ball of fur at my side and the soft swooshing of the ceiling fan.
Spooky stared at me.
I stared at Linda.
I quickly came to realize the perfection of that moment.
Moonlight seeped into the room. It flowed through the slats in the window shutters like a vanilla milkshake and spilled across the bed, painting my purring wife and kitty in blue-white pixie dust.
I sat for nearly an hour, honoring the moon, celebrating my existence in the universe and without her even knowing it, falling deeper in love with my sleeping wife.
I don’t remember laying back down or falling back asleep again. It’s as if at that moment, time stood still. The earth stopped spinning and let the moon flood my simple, humble, human bedroom.
In the morning when Linda gently woke me, as she does every day, with a coffee on my night stand and her cool hand on my face, I didn’t know if I dreamed it or not.
But after my first sip of black coffee I tasted something and checked that she didn’t put cream in it.
Hmmm, vanilla.

All of this of course has nothing to do with the photo above. I could hardly express with words that experience, let alone on film or CCD.
This person applying makeup backstage performs at The Queen Mary in Studio City.