Ways in Which I'm Not Like Weave...

...I don't gleefully drive into the teeth of a shit-storm. Weaver does; that's his Droid spewing live radar all over the the spotless interior of Unit 15. If I know Weave, he was racing toward the red zone while manning the scanners while popping off the occasional snapshot. Don't worry, though. Dude's like a trained professional. Plus, he's seen like every episode of Dukes of Hazzard there is - even that crappy half-season when they replaced Bo and Luke with weirdly inverted doppelgangers. But I digress - something you'll never see Chris Weaver do, as he usually bum-rushes the fecal spray without a safety goggle in sight. Me, I'm a bit more reticent.

In fact, when Chris and countless other camera-nerds were out chasing rainmakers, I was ensconced in a dry edit bay, smoothing out less than linear transitions and sorting Peanut M&M's. Hey, it wasn't like I was hiding! Rather, I was fleshing out an update on a grim hit and run. Mother Luck stuck me with a reporter today and while we hunkered over source material inside, the rest of the world was unraveling. Or so it seemed when I wandered into the newsroom... Scanners crackled, managers shouted and reporters read out loud... why it took me twenty minutes to slow-crawl out of there! Once I got back to my tucked-away edit bay, I considered sealing the door cracks with leftover bits of duct tape - in hopes of blocking any runaway light from catching the eye of a passing assignment editor. Nobody in here but us chickens!

Weaver, meanwhile, was triangulating cloud patterns with dispatcher accents, hoping like hell to pierce the thrum of the front so he could shoot some wicked cool footage and obtain videographer immortality. If it sounds like I'm mocking him, I'm not. Okay, so maybe just a little but the truth of the matter is I got mad respect for Weave and anyone else who voluntarily plunges into the Great Unknown. That, of course, is where memories are made; highly stimulating visual situations so deeply imprinted they'll be making your eyelids twitch long after you've been relegated to some rest home hallway. I got mine. So too does Weaver, but unlike so many others of his particular vintage, he's retained an insatiable taste for the uncomfortable chase FAR PAST the normal news career spoil date.

I really respect that - even if my own idea of proper rain-gear simply involves staying the hell inside.