Where's the flash powder?

The film came first, ten square photos bundled in a protective, silver seal. Per the printed instructions, I put it in the refrigerator beside the pickles. At noon, today, the USPS delivered my camera to my door, a Polaroid Job-Pro, recipient of my chilled film.

I can't focus it, really. It has a flash, and at some point I'll read the instructions to learn how to override it, and it's bumblebee yellow. Oh, and it comes with a black, cloth strap. There's a setting on the front with two options: one, for distances four feet or closer, and two, four feet or greater. There is no USB port.

Technological advances never occur without a rallying, cultist consolidation around the displaced medium. In other words, new developments reduce the number of admirers of a given technology, forcing them to band together to form cliques whose purpose it is to celebrate the left-behind. Go online and see: Polaroid has its own supportive culture, swapping images, trading tips, and admiring others' work. There's even a gallery in France devoted entirely to it!

I like the idiosyncrasies produced by imperfect media, like the Polaroids, because most of my memories of experiencing movies, music and LIFE have been in imperfect settings with loads of background interference: singing along to the Beatles in a car with the windows down; reading magazines while waiting nervously for a dentist appointment, most of my college years, family trips in hot cars, my head addled with fast-food; watching movies on old, analogue TV sets in between make out sessions.

Even my most vivid memories are not rebroadcast to me in 15.1 Megapixel clarity. They're stuccoed with sweat, blurred by time and dust, are grainy and inconsistent, much like they were experienced the first time, fragmented by my own, rambling thought-process. Each memory is unique to me, and shaped inexorably by me over years of subjective dismissal and acknowledgment.

The Polaroid Job Pro camera cost thirteen dollars on Ebay. Since Polaroid discontinued their film production earlier this year, the package of ten I bought online cost twice as much as the camera itself, with further scarcity sure to increase the price to roughly two dollars an image. I'll have to be prudent with my pictures, which will result in more meaningful images.

I have taken two pictures now: one of my bedroom lamp, and the other of a silverware mobile hanging from my ceiling, ordinary objects each, and rendered with an odd, realistic majesty by a camera that couldn't take the same picture twice.

The Job Pro is coming with me to Portland in early November, and will capture the scenery in ways that my memory will eventually choose to regard it: warm, overexposed, discolored, washed, bleached, raw and real. As soon as I can, I'll scan some of my pictures, and you can share them, too.