Picture of the Day - Mammodouy's Pictures

My faithful readers have noticed that I have become a very erratic writer. It is becoming harder and harder for me to write on a regular basis even though I am still full of imagination. Ideas keep buzzing through my head and then the humdrum routine of everyday life overrides my literary and artsy longings.

One cause may be that my life has become rather complicated those past two years. I travel a lot more and I move around a lot for many reasons I won’t dwell upon. It’s rather boring! The funny backwash being that sometimes, I feel I am turning into a suitcase. Does a suitcase write stories? No, it does not. But since I am not really turning into a suitcase either, there must be another reason for my obvious lack of work.

 This is when and where I have to acknowledge one major failing. I am a born procrastinator. There are tons of real and irrelevant and certainly always useless things to do that freeze me up! I have written a post about this. Enjoy!

On the other hand and because life is never all right nor all wrong, I also happen to loose my grip on writing regularly because I get most of my ideas from things I see, places I go to and pictures I take and when things and places and pictures get too plentiful, my willingness to write (and maybe my brain too) tend to slacken off as if my thoughts were caught in a traffic jam…

I end up spending a lot of time gazing at clouds, smelling flowers, watching the sea or the passers-by, enjoying life with the greatest intellectual laziness and of course, picking a book which I will read from cover to cover with great joy and then a second one and… and… and days go by. Sometimes I even forget there is a world where I do enjoy using words of my own and telling stories.

In June 2014, I wrote a post I called : “Writing Interview - Mammodouy’s Way”. It still is very relevant.

Mid 2015, I decided to get a very professional website besides my professional website. A website that would allow me to combine my two blogs - “The Storyteller” and “Mammodouy’s Pictures” which most of you are not even aware of plus a couple of “serious” writing projects.

I got in touch with a web designer. A woman. We got along just fine until November 12 when we exchanged our last mails. I had sent her important information she needed sorely. She had answered me immediately, telling me that progress on my website would go very fast from then on and that she’d get in touch with me, before the end of the following week, so that we’d meet for a follow-up as soon as possible.

For those of you who don’t really keep track of dates, the following night was the night of the terror attacks on restaurants and the Bataclan. November 13, 2015.

My web designer kept silent from that day on. I am pretty sure that she did not die on the 13th of November because the government issued a list of the names of the victims several weeks later. But there was no list of the wounded, of course. No list of people who had lost their loved ones or of people who were suffering from PTSD, for obvious reasons.

I know I should get in touch with her company. At first, there was the shock, even if I wrote that I was not feeling hatred and that I was not afraid, I now realize that I spent a few months totally shell-shocked. Time went by with no news from her, maybe for the same reasons that distress me… And now it is getting harder and harder to get on the phone. I feel numb.

All this to explain why from time to time, one of my posts from the “Storyteller” blog will be called “Picture of the day”. You’ll find under this title the picture posted that day in “Mammodouy’s Pictures”. I encourage you to go look at it in the blog itself because the settings there are much nicely fit for pictures than in a blog dedicated to stories! And the picture will be much bigger!

I published many pictures in that blog, starting in August 2010 till now. They are pictures I really like but that I don’t think I’ll ever exhibit. Except that life is always full of surprises. One of them will make its way to the Grand Palais in Paris in February 2017.

But this is another story…

Here is my "Picture of the Day" (yester-day actually...) - "Could This Be Africa Floating Away from Table Bay, South Africa?"

A few words about this picture - Last March, I was on top of Table Mountain, in Cape Town, South Africa. It was windy and rather cloudy. I was looking at Robben Island in the distance and all of a sudden I spotted the shadow of a cloud on the ocean below. The cloud itself was banal. Just a cloud already frayed by the wind. But this shadow into the light became priceless... Short-lived and yet such a symbol...





*Good Luck, and Good Night*