Available

The human desire for profundity persists.

An intensity of feeling or quality.

Extending far below the surface.

Intellectual depth and insight.

Painted canvas on an easel in the artist’s studio.

But our inability to escape our own seeming absurdity is the balance.

Ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous.

No rational or orderly relationship to human life.

Meaningless.

This picture I made was a passing moment that few people originally saw as I did, if at all. I was returning to work at the lunch hour on one of those overcast and hazy days where picking out the horizon is impossible. As I turned the corner at the end of my block, I saw that a groundskeeping crew had arrived for scheduled weekly service at a commercial property which had recently ripped out grass and zeroscaped with gravel, rocks, and cacti. Someone had deployed the mower to its normal work position but it was clear there had been a miscommunication between the property manager and the crew. A man was standing by a truck and trailer full of gardening equipment at the edge of the property while talking on the phone. Clearly, he was wanting to know if his scheduled services needed alteration, or if they were needed at all.

The scene grabbed my peripheral vision and I immediately pulled my car to a stop in front of the building. Here was this unneeded, used and abused lawnmower as though it were a broken-down space rover in a hostile environment elsewhere in the solar system. The diffuse, top-down, from-behind lighting made the whole scene feel stark and otherworldly. Few shadows were cast and an even light blanketed all. The dry, grey sidewalk that extended a dozen feet from the curb to the edge of the landscape was stained with drainage puddles made by sprinklers that no longer existed, which once flooded the grass that no longer existed.

And here were these synthetic, rectangular islands of warm, yellow gravel with bright green cacti. The only other life in the image is the reflection of the trees across the street, looming darkly over the foreground. This part of the building was vacant. No passers-by were evident, and the owner of the lawnmower retreated for the moment. The lines of the building and the sidewalks both draw my eye to the bright red mower in the middle but they also tangle the moment and pull me back to the edges.

In the middle of it all a sign indicates a space for rent, some place for an aspiring entrepreneur to sell their wares. For a moment, I chuckled at the alignment of the mower and the sign, and then found myself lost in the thought of what the word ‘available’ means.

Ready for immediate use.

Accessible. Obtainable.

Present.