The Curse of the Should-Have-Dones

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I do not know the attractive couple entering the above photo from the left side of the frame, but that is okay, as I did not take the photo, and this is not about them.

If I had a steadier hand with the photo-editing Clone Stamp tool, the two of them would instead be an oddly tall bush of purple flowers or another stack of blue Peroni umbrellas or two more versions of the bicycle that they are walking towards.

My hand is not that steady with the photo-editing tools, so their brief moment together (are they still together?) was spared awkward editing. May the rest of their lives together or the remainder of their lives apart continue to be free of terrible editing decisions or (yikes!) deletion by a heavy-handed photo perfectionist like me.
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The Night I Stole …

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The ludicrous amount of paperwork is what saved us. Or the fact that possibly no one at the yard had created the documents that would have been needed to handle the situation, or no one would have been able to find them if they did exist, to be the paperwork that I just mentioned.

We were up to no good, but in a harmless way, so no harm had been done, so nothing was done about us the night I stole a train.
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Sandra Bland’s Final Free Moments

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old civil rights activist who died in the Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, last Monday, might be alive today and her name unknown to all of us if the state trooper who pulled her over for failing to signal a lane change had not become irritated at her refusal to extinguish her cigarette while she sat in her car.
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