Let Me Be Your Caption (Not a Sext, But Could Be)

This post is inspired by this article. It's a camera that sends your photo to an Amazon team of people, who then interpret your photo in their own words, and send you a print out. I want it. I want it badly. But then I remembered that I should be aspiring not to be the photographer, but the person writing the descriptions. So I had my friends send me some photos they would like descriptions of. 

It is a DVD case for Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore being held up by a human hand, which looks to either be a woman's, or an exceptionally well manicured 12 yr old boy. The movie cover has three dogs lined up in descending order of height, and in the background an evil cat ninja is stealing what could be a fish or a fish shaped bomb. There is a price tag for 19.99, which seems optimistic in today's media economy.

It is a photo of a long wooden bar. In the background we can see all the liquor bottles lined up against a mirror. On the bar are approx 21 beer bottles of different brands lined up like bowling pins. In the middle there is a sparkler. Next to the bottles on the bar is a pink memo pad and pen, there are notes but we can't read them. A lone beer, ostracized by the group, sits on the right edge of the frame, scheming the groups inevitable takedown.

The location is unclear. It could be a sea floor, an aquarium tank floor, a museum display made of plaster. I find it impossible to definitely say this is a red brownish colored prehistoric sting ray. Something about the illustration makes me flinch, makes it seem like this is a fictional set up. It could be a shoe buried in sand. It could be a painting. There are two small white dots on the nose of the stingray/prehistoric museum display fishy/buried shoe, and they look like googly eyes. Let's name it Frank.

There is a huge black and white photo ad framed in a dark shiny wooden frame, leaning against a wall of grey blue painted slats, with track lighting shining down. The floor is burnished concrete. In the ad, we see the torsos of two young men, standing face to face, their pelvises angled towards each other, clad in the kind of shorts that look like they were foraged out of a department store after the zombie apocalypse, when you didn't have the time to make sure they fit because you were too busy trying to keep those plate glass doors closed while the rotting throngs swelled against the entrance a tidal wave of society's worst evil. 

I must be drunk. I can't tell what those animals are. I think my contacts are dry. There is a white wooden slat fence, and behind it, two shadowy black and white animals that could be pigs or cows lying down, or dead goats, I don't know. The sign says Animals May Bite, Please Do Not Feed. No worries, I'm not sticking my hand in that pen till I know what the fuck those are. 

The background is grass, and it is a sunny day. In the foreground is the headless figure of a young man, wearing shorts and a blue faded Green Eggs and Ham tshirt. He is jauntily holding with one hand a very large rifle, extending the handle out to the picture taker like one would a golf club. There is a briefcase on the ground by his leg. 

It is a bowl full of jello shots with the little plastic lids on them. The bowl is orange. I bet this photo was taken at Tina's, a karaoke bar where I always end up singing George Michael and The Cars and  *NSync. Do you like how I remembered the asterisk there?

It is the face of the man who pulled you from the sinkhole and then stole a DeLorean which he used to go back in time and manipulate you into sleeping with your mom, thus completely canceling out your existence. He is wearing a wifebeater and pulling the photographer from the car with a very creepy half smile. 

There are three young dark haired women in a crowd. Their heads are all craned upwards to display the incredibly intricate and beautifully drawn gaping maws they have painted on their necks and chests, so that they give the appearance of cartoonish mutated toothy beasts screaming. They are holding paper cartoon dialogue balloons next to their heads, which proclaim in Spanish

 "We have the right to be outraged. Educational excellence for all!" 

Behind them is a large golden lit classical building that leads us to believe they are at a capital of something. The whole thing smacks of Guernica and communism and that poster my dad had framed about the Spanish Civil War. But it could very well be taking place in Mexico, because let's face it, our knowledge of the southern western hemisphere is fucked. We're like children, we are living in our parents pre-Internet preconceived notions of foreign countries.

It is a photo of a waterfront. We see the curve of the harbor, and several streetlights standing stark against the grey blue water, and the darker grey of a mountain range across the water. There is a low modern building, and  a small single person standing by a streetlight. From where the water and the mountains meet, we see a nearly invisible plume of smoke rising ethereally into the smoky overcast blue sunlight. It is a large ship, or a volcano, or a dragon. This is what dragons look like in real life, just smoke signals coming from across the lakes, barely on the edge of our perception and we go along, living our lives, walking the bottoms of mountains, avoiding the higher regions where the monsters and immortals live. The man is standing on one leg like a crane.