Author Archives: Steve Mays

PlasticSurgery.com

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Missouri highways are encrusted with nasty-ass billboards from border to border. Our claim to shame. Yesterday we spotted a board for PlasticSurgery.com When I got home I got curious and clicked around a bit until I found a list of procedures. A few that caught my eye:

  • Body Contouring – Removes loose, hanging skin from the body, after gastric bypass surgery, stomach stapling or gastric banding (gastric bypass).
  • Buttocks Augmentation – This procedure is designed to enhance the size of the buttocks. Buttock augmentation can be done by using silicone implants or fat from a person’s body, known as fat transfer (or “fat grafting“).
  • Eyebrow Lift (for the person who questions everything)
  • Fat Grafting – This procedure will remove a patient’s own fat to re-implant it where needed.
  • Jaw Implant – sounds painful
  • Forehead Lift – This procedure softens the angry or tired look caused by a wrinkled brow. Most forehead lift patients are between ages 40 and 60 years old.
  • Threadlift – Although a threadlift can raise droopy areas of the brow, cheeks, jowls, and neck, it will not produce the same dramatic results as a facelift or brow lift.

John Mays

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This photo was in an album my mother put together so I can assume this is a member of the family. Based on stamp on reverse, the photo was processed (and shot?) in Brookfield, Missouri, where my father grew up. He was born January 21, 1926 (in Elmira, New York) so he appears to be two or three years old in this photo. Let’s go with three.

The Great Depression started in 1929 (and lasted until 1939) and I recall my mother mentioning that my father’s family had a very tough time during those years. Like lots of folks. I don’t recall my father ever talking about growing up during the Depression. Nor my mom, except to say her family had it a bit easier because they lived on a farm and could grow most of their own food.

Their generation lived through The Great Depression and World War II. Chapters in a history book for me but day-to-day life for them. Seeing photos from that time makes it a bit more real.

Baby Steve

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The photo with John and Evelyn was most likely taken in Kansas City where John’s parents lived. The shot with the horses in the background would have been taken on the Perry family farm near Broseley, Missouri. We’re guessing that last, blurry photo is Baby Steve because it was found with the others. The little bib overalls suggests this might have been taken at the same time as the two on the brick porch.

Junior High basketball team

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My buddy John and I were two of five seventh graders that ‘made’ the junior high basketball team. (Sorry, can’t remember the other three) I remember this as a Very Big Deal at the time. I also remember that I wasn’t a very good basketball player. I didn’t handle the ball well and I wasn’t much of a shot. I was selected solely on the basis of “hustle.”

Coaches love hustle. They believe they can teach you how to be a better ball handler and improve your shooting skills… but they can’t give you that special mojo known as hustle. You have it or you don’t.

What Coach Proctor mistook for hustle in that skinny white boy was a near-pathological need to please this new male authority figure in my life. Throw myself headlong onto the hardwood floor? No problemo. Run “potato races” (sometimes known as “behind the lines”) until my lungs burst? I can do that.

None of which contributed very much to the final score but coaches know they need some of this second-string fire to keep the good players pushed (nudged?).

As I got older I discovered I could have much more fun in a pickup game at the park. Which is where I met Freddie B who lived in near-by public housing and played wearing rubber flip-flops. Freddie didn’t hustle. And he didn’t miss. From anywhere on the court. Swish.

These days, as I allow myself to move with the Tao, I sometimes flow, but I don’t hustle.

Google PhotoScan

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When Peter Smith suggested this app I said “thanks” but was thinking, ‘Not gonna come close to the image I get with my flatbed scanner.’ But I gave it a try and… pretty damned close. Rather amazing. I’ll probably keep using my scanner for some of the really old stuff because I can control the resolution and use Pixelmator to ‘repair’ the image as needed. But most folks won’t fuck with all of that. With this app you could breeze through a shoebox full of old photos in no time. One final thought: this video is very well done.

Horsing around on the front porch

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Blane, Evelyn and Steve (and Pierre?) goofing on the front porch at 500 Walter Street, Kennett, MO. Date unknown.

My first steps?

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Another never-before-seen photo from the recently discovered Mystery Photo Album. My mother had written “first steps” on the border of the photo. I was born in March and it looks like I’m about one year old here so, spring of 1949? Tried to remove the crease but it looked worse so I left it. This is as close to time travel as I’ll get.

John and Evelyn (March, 1946)

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I’ve read that memories are not retrieved or recalled but recreated. Sort of recompiled, changing slightly each time. Is a photo a memory? Only if I took the photo, was there to experience the moment captured. Is a photo history? Arguably more accurate than the one my brain creates.

I’m not headed anywhere with this, just rambling. These two photos are of my mother and father (and an unidentified friend). Probably taken sometime in 1946. My father was discharged from the Navy on March 9, 1946. He married my mother on March 23, 1946. So, as mom often claimed, they knew each other for two weeks before taking the plunge. This suggests the photos below were taken in March of 1946.

I can never know the people in these photos. What that time was like for them. This is as close as I will ever come. One instant in time (two in this case). Where were they? How long had they known each other. When/where/how did they meet? Who took the photos and why? Then again, maybe it’s better not to know. We can create our own histories, which we do in any event.

For me There is powerful magic in old photos. Even if I don’t know the people.

Does William Gibson know what’s ahead?

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“It’s the music of a disenfranchised, mostly white proletariat, barely hanging on in post-post-industrial America.” William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties was published in 1999 so the line above was written at least 17 years ago. More so than any other writer, I get the feeling Gibson somehow knows what’s ahead for us. Maybe he gave us a glimpse of that in The Peripheral. Perhaps that future is already here. I wish I could pick up the phone and call Mr. Gibson or Kevin Kelly or James Gleick or (insert name of really smart person here): “I’m sorry to bother you, but what do you think? Is everything going to be okay or not?”