What with a giant oil slick headed for our shore, random news crews are popping up along the Gulf Coast in hopes they'll be the first to spot the blob. It would all be delightfully absurd - were it not such an environmental Waterloo. Still, it's one more reminder that no matter what peril our planet faces, there will be a clot of its most annoying citizens thrusting lights and lenses at the gaping maw of the moment. I'm reminded of the Summer of the Shark a few years back, when field producers from FOX News were caught spreading chum just off Martha's Vineyard. Okay, so that never happened (as far as we know), but you can rest assured that if a hovering spaceship suddenly appeared and started turning citizens inside out, news reporters would rush to the scene and fight for a proper spot in which to debut their designer entrails. Worse yet, they'd drag a hapless shooter like myself alone and before you know it my ignoble end is being twisted into a Made For TV Movie starring that guy who played McLovin' as the furry cameraman who got too close.
That's an intestinal tract I don't need to share with the world, but I cannot guarantee it won't happen, for despite all my armchair smarm, I too rush headlong into misfortune with the notion I won't get hurt as long as I'm packin' a Sony of my owny. Hurricanes, forest fire, daycare stroller regatta: there are few scenarios even a reticent bookworm like me won't storm. Chalk it up to foolish pride, occupational myopia or the mistaken assumption that I deserve a front row seat solely because I spoon-feed select images to the great unwashed. So the very next time a volcano upchucks, or a tribe of Sleestax takes over the Post Office or some fry-cook finds an image of the Virgin Mary burnished into a hamburger bun, remind me how I'm just a mid-market photog with a writing compulsion, severe tennis elbow and a five foot nothing wife of twenty years who might actually miss me should I wind up disemboweled on the evening news...
I promise I won't get mad.
1 comment:
Yea and walking around the corner from where I parked to take all these pictures at Gulf Shores just to get hit by the aroma of generator exhaust was enough to make one terribly homesick.
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