Postcards From The Black Lodge and a Damn Fine Cup of Coffee
I hate this time of year.
For those who know me, such a statement isn’t shocking. While it’s pretty derivative, it’s one I seem to utter with stronger conviction in each passing cold season. I shouldn’t be surprised, though. As the calendar reaches these particular pages in this corner of the world, I know what’ll happen: the temperature will drop, the sun will shine less, and time will shift. One might think that after 33 years of life, I’d get used to it or find some healthy way to cope. Yet, in the years when I’ve managed to abscond away from the Midwestern snow that sits in dirty, grey heaps on the roadside—the feelings of that opening statement persist. Even a Santa Monica sunset will struggle to hold its charm as it occurs so early on a January evening.
This is a time of year when the scents of chain restaurants hang low in the air and your pace slows in beat-down boots atop snow-covered sidewalks. A time when consumerism doubles down on division—not simply between the haves and have-nots, but between those who give and those who take. Do you identify with the clerk ringing out an endless line of people, or, the “assertive” customer who believes in belligerence?
“Get in the spirit!”
That’s what you’ll constantly be told. As if the surrounding world is an idyllic, snow-covered small town from a Hallmark movie. A landscape dotted with cozy cabins and longstanding Christmas traditions, not one of vast parking lots drowned in road salt and Chick-fil-A traffic jams. It’s not the holidays themselves that really bother me, it’s what I’ve come to see as their contrivance. Manufactured obligations and feelings.
I don’t mean to disparage those who enjoy this time of year, but as an adult, I’ve always found it (despite true effort) to be a dark time both literally and physically. A season when anxieties are heightened and slights thought forgotten can return with renewed fervor. All of it annually brought on by a particular station in time, no matter how much meaning you try to claw away from it through combative rationalization.
The sorts of feelings and thoughts being expressed here are certainly nothing profound, groundbreaking, or unique. Nor are the photographs featured or the analogies I’m about to make. As simple as this whole post is, though, it has made sense from time to time, and transferring it to something on this website from pages in a notebook reminds me of that. So, with that being said: are you familiar with Twin Peaks?
If not, well, no heavy spoilers abound, nor is any real context needed.
It took me forever to finally watch the acclaimed series that began in 1990. By the end of binging the second season, I was furious at how it all ended and swore off the show. But then the movie roped me back in and the third season sealed the deal. As the winter of 2022 approached, I had become a devoted disciple of David Lynch, Dale Cooper, and Dougie Jones.
There’s one particular thing from the show’s plot that’s essential to my thoughts here: The Black Lodge. To whittle down hours of fan theory and attempts to decipher the minds of creators Lynch and Frost: The Black Lodge is, simply put, a bad place to be. After ingesting the whole series over the course of a month, I started to recognize sights around me that felt reminiscent of the show’s visual themes. Generally, these were liminal spaces I’d come across at night—a night that had started to arrive quicker and stay longer as time fell backwards and winter began to set in. I started shooting these scenes as I saw them, and, in time realized that some of my work from previous years fell into the same vein.
As I debated what to do with these photographs, I joked to my friend Steve (the man who had introduced me to Twin Peaks in his living room on a whim one evening) that I’d call the collection of images “Postcards from The Black Lodge.” That seemed too hokey, though. Too on the nose. So, I decided to keep shooting until I came up with a name I liked or some way to describe what I was attempting to capture and evoke. If I did anything with these images at all.
Photography, for me, has always been an exercise in self-reflection. Despite the confidence that comes from that knowledge, however, I wasn’t in the mood to recognize what was happening. As the images got more liminal and seemingly more bleak, I was falling deeper into the seasonal affliction of feeling low. By Christmas Eve, things came to a head.
I found myself racked with guilt. The kind of guilt that seems irrational in hindsight, but rips at the core of your being in the moment. A guilt that causes you to wonder if you’re taking the things you love for granted.
“The dog is always happy to see you when you come home, why isn’t that enough?”
“You’re fortunate to frequently see family, not just at the holidays, and life doesn’t last forever—why can’t you enjoy the moment and the time you have with the people around you?”
And, yet, as your mind forces you to question statements like these, you still can’t shake it. You just feel guilt and want to move on. As I did. To a Waffle House.
Not my Waffle House. No, this was another one. One that happened to be the only thing open on a certain stretch of road that had all of its bars closed for the holiday. When I pulled up, the yellow lights of the iconic diner chain were cutting into the black of night. Inside, the warmth of people and the workings of the grill had caused the windows to fog over. The scene seemed perfectly reminiscent of Twin Peaks, another capture for my state of mind and the ongoing photo series I’d been casually working on. I figured that as soon as I finished my food and conversation, I’d make another photograph and be on my way to the next thing.
Instead, I ordered coffee.
I remember once, in Catholic grade school, the parish priest describing how he’d once heard the voice of God calling to him. From then on, he devoted his life to the faith. I don’t think God was talking to me in that Waffle House (nor do I think any Twin Peaks style mysticism was involved), but I did feel overly compelled to order a simple cup of coffee. For awhile, I’d stopped drinking coffee so late in the evenings. And when I’d been having it in the mornings, I’d been relying on “red eyes.” As I took a seat opposite of one of my best friends, someone I hadn’t seen in months, ordering a simple cup of black coffee seemed like the first thing I’d done in a long time that truly felt right.
Catching up, several topics came to pass. We both teared up, we both laughed, and we both yucked it up with the waitress about car troubles and our mutual connections from the world of Waffle House. When it came time to leave, something had shifted.
“You should probably stop making those depressing photos,” my friend said, as he kindly paid the bill and gave me a hug.
And he was right.
As I drove home to the dog and trudged up to my building in beat-down boots atop a snow-covered sidewalk, I decided to end this photo series with one particular image: the first cup of coffee from the evening. Because, once again, something from Twin Peaks had come to mind. This time it wasn’t the dark and malevolent nature of The Black Lodge, but rather, a line by Special Agent Dale Cooper:
“You know—this is, excuse me, a damn fine cup of coffee. I’ve had, I can’t tell you, how many cups of coffee in my life and this… this is one of the best.”
What I’d experienced that evening was just that, a damn fine cup of coffee. One of the absolute best I’ve ever had. And in good company where honest words were spoken.
This collection of photographs isn’t anything particularly special. They’re nighttime shots of liminal spaces and random things I’ve come across, all of it inspired from too much emphasis put on binging and reading into a fictional television series. But with that cup of coffee, I found myself drawing parallels to the show once more. It brought me out of “The Black Lodge”—not through a light socket in an abandoned Las Vegas home—but in a Waffle House on Rt. 4. For awhile, I was free. And while I’ve found myself back in “The Black Lodge” from time to time since, and will no doubt be drawn back in on occasion, at least I’ll always have coffee.
When I went to wrap up this post, I kept thinking: “This all feels too dramatic, too juvenile. Like something you might author in an angsty online journal as a high school kid.” But as low-brow as it may all seem, I’ve found something of a peace in it. Just like I did in watching a certain television show. And also like that show, I’m not going to try and understand it.
I’m just going to enjoy it for what it is.
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