"Some of my best friends are zombies..."

In an ideal world I'd work weeks in advance, crafting languid epics fraught with nuance. As it is I roll in like a hopped-up SWAT cop, never taking my eyes off the clock as I shoot, move and inquire. I'd like to slow my roll, but there's simply never the time. Take today for instance, when the producers decided a story I was hoping to shoot next week would be perfect for tonight's 5:00 newscast. It's easy to hurl thunderbolts from on high, I tell them, but I'M the schmuck who's gotta bumrush a haunted house. (They're never too impressed when I make my sweeping statements, but occasionally they tear themselves away from their Facebook page long enough to chuckle.) Anyhoo, it was not before one o clock this afternoon that I gained ingress to said seasonal attraction, by which time I was more than willing to take a hostage if that's what making my deadline meant.

That's when I met the parties of Goodson and Harp.

Tucked away in ramshackled splendor, these two miscreants spend their days hunched over latex, glue and their own imaginations. Taking in the various deathmasks and tricked-out body suits that populate the labs of Spookywoods FX, I realized what my childhood chum with the Fangoria magazines in his bookbag wished he were doing right now. Dude's probably a real estate agent by now, but that's not important. What IS important is that Mark Goodson and Joh Harp allowed my fancycam into their lair, put up with my patter, even answered my silly questions for the entire ninety minutes I was on scene. If that's not enough, one of them even donned their trademark walking corpse suit and struck the kind of Elvis poses seen at zombie conventions the world over. That makes for good television, fellas - even if I did overdo it with repetitive music stings.

But this post (or this blog, for that matter) isn't about the finished product I foist on viewers everday. It's about the pathos and bathos of life behind the lens. Try as I might to leave it all on screen, there's no way to convey the kicks I still get from pointing my camera this way and that. Throw in the chance to write, dice and slice and you have my idea of a notable hump-day. See, I always make slot; I rarely make friends. Today, I did both.

Not bad for a quickie...