Jay's not an enthusiastic headline writer, so you take the good with the bad here. Headlines sometimes pop into the brain and literally write themselves. Good ones, even. Bad ones, alas, can take much agonizing time to concoct while the Muse laughs and cackles. There are people who have a natural talent with headlines, and Jay's met lots of them, but doesn't count himself among their number. When it comes to headlines, he works for everything he gets, and often gets little for his work.

The same is true of poetry. Jay's Muse came for a stay a few decades ago and dropped pithy lines all over the place, trusting Jay to gather and record them. He did that, troubling the Muse on occasion for a completion to something well begun, but never achieved the stardom as a poet that some people enjoy without even working up a sweat. It's all there, the vocabulary, the imagery, the finely honed appreciation of the nuances of language. But it doesn't come without the Muse's inspiration, and Jay can't even force it to work, as he usually can with prose. His entire poetic output is but a thin sheaf of lines that he hasn't incremented or polished, or even looked through in years. Indeed, the few people he permitted to look at his work were all in agreement that it was, on the whole, worthless. Exit Muse, stage left.

But this week, again, deadlines loom, so have to do with a picture to tide over till another time. A little abstraction this time. Jay particularly likes abstract images that are something to begin with - abstracted ways of looking at reality, perhaps odd angles, extreme closeups, or lit in some unusual way. This picture starts off as a simple picture of a green plastic float, floating in the swimming pool here at the apartment complex during the annual pool party last week. The apartment management puts on the party to celebrate summer with hot dogs, burgers, and humidity. A good time was had by all. To bring out the plastic floatness of the plastic float, Jay added some Photoshop filters. It's a shot taken with his pointy shooty aim-and-mash-button pocketable camera, and the odd natural light gave it the alien look you see here. It didn't need much color correction. He applied a tonemapping filter that enhanced the midtone contrast, plus an Orton effect that emphasized the pillowy look of the float's folds. To the small version for this blog he added several whacks of unsharp masking to accentuate the texture. If none of this technospeak means anything to you, you're fortunate. Just enjoy the picture. Click it for a bigger view on RedBubble.com.