I’m not going to pretend this makes sense. I didn’t drive Elena’s stuffed animal to a maximum-security prison because I was thinking clearly. I did it because sometimes the only honest response to the world is to lean into the absurdity until it cracks open and shows something true.
San Quentin sits there on the bay like a broken tooth in a beautiful mouth. All that water, all that light, and right there, this monument to every way we’ve failed each other. The thing about taking a fox puppet to prison is that nobody asks me to explain yourself. The guards see weirder shit before breakfast. I’m just another California eccentric with too much time and not enough sense.
Mister Fox didn’t ask for this. He’s a prop, a stand-in for childhood innocence or theatrical whimsy or whatever the hell we project onto these inanimate witnesses we drag through our lives. And maybe that’s the point. We’re all just being dragged places we didn’t sign up for, past razor wire and into the sun, trying to maintain some dignity in the face of the cosmic joke.
The Golden Gate was obligatory. Every doomed thing gets its postcard moment. The yacht club was for contrast, because if I’m going to document a stuffed animal’s descent into the California prison-industrial complex, I might as well show the other California first. The one with money and sailboats and people who’ve never had to think about what happens when society gives up on you.
I should’ve just returned him. Driven straight to Elena and said, “You left this.” But that would’ve been boring. That would’ve been sensible. And sensible doesn’t photograph well, doesn’t burrow into your brain at 1:58 AM when you’re wondering what the hell you’re doing with your life.
Sometimes you’ve got to take Mister Fox to prison. Sometimes the only way to process the darkness is to document it, to bear witness with whatever tools I have, even if that tool is a stuffed animal and a camera phone. It’s not therapy. It’s not art. It’s just… necessary. Like screaming into a void that occasionally screams back.
The thing is, I did return him eventually. Elena got Mister Fox back. But we both knew, me and Mister Fox, we’d seen something. Something about beauty and brutality existing in the same frame. Something about how we’re all just one bad decision away from the wrong side of that fence, and how thin the line is between the absurd and the profound.
Or maybe I’m full of shit and just wanted to take weird photos.
That’s valid too.