- For Experience Writing Halloween Photography Challenge: RITUAL
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Photo A.M. Moscoso
- When I was a little kid, I used to catch the bus to school with my friends.
- Our bus stop was on the road, because at the time there was no sidewalks- in fact it wasn’t even paved yet, it was a gravel road.
- About three feet behind us was a ditch, so when a car came racing down the road, we used to have to jump over the ditch and hang onto the fence ( the guy who lived on the other side of the fence was sort of crazy-) and he would yell at us to ‘get off his property NOW.”
- One day we found a cat, which had not been as lucky as us when it came to diving out of the way of speeding cars, dead in the ditch. The ditch which was full of water because it had been raining a lot.
- The rainwater was whooshing threw the ditch the way it was supposed to, but it wasn’t strong enough to take the cat.
- So there we were, – about eight Elementary aged kids on the lookout for cars standing in front of a ditch with the corpse of a poor dead water bloated cat for company trapped inside of it.
- Some of us ignored the cat and a few of us would look down into the ditch to see what state Sammy ( sure we named him ) was in.
- I was one of the lookers and when the water in the ditch went down I showed up with my best friends Ronnie and Darrin. We scooped Sammy up with a snow shovel and buried him in my backyard.
- So where is my true childhood story going?
- You may think that watching Sammy return to the Earth had something to do with the material I chose to write and read and even the field I worked in. But it didn’t
- What happened was I started to develop a fascination with watching buildings, or cars even bill boards and now because it’s all over the place- graffiti- deteriorate.
- I can now look at organic matter as death strips it down and returns it to the Earth and I have a good feel for the time line and how the environment plays a role.
- But when it comes to inorganic things breaking down, what affects it are random and nothing can bring more random elements to any situation like people. Watching this process has become a ritual of mine and I have to say I am a serious practioner.
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Photo A.M. Moscoso
- Below are two pictures.
- One is a a black and white picture ( I altered it to bring out the white image and burn marks) that used to be part of a bigger drawing. It was formless and I think it was started out as a face, it really was hard to tell what it was supposed to be.
- Recently a homeless lady has been sleeping under it and she started burning away the stickers that people had stuck around it and on it. Before she did that it was a slow rot, but it was fun to watch it change from day to day.
- This is what is left- I think it looks like a ghost. I don’t have a before shot because as I mentioned, a homeless lady was living under it so I didn’t take ‘before’ pictures.
Photo A.M. Moscoso
This was a sticker on a lamp post, it was pretty scary looking to begin with, but then someone to a marking pen and drew all over it, and the it rained.
That sticker went from scary to horrifying and sure- I am impressed.
Photo A.M.Moscoso
( this is what it looked like before )
Photo A.M. Moscoso
I suppose my hobby- my ritual doesn’t sound like the most exciting pastime one could participate in.
But I enjoy it.
I like the concept of having found a ghost “in the wild” so to speak. I’m not grossed out by animals decaying, but it’s not something I need to see again.
Kids have that curiousity, but I couldn’t do that now either.