Shooters

Shooters: getting down to business with old friends: gots to git paid in this dark year of our Lord: the mysterious lives of old friends: aimless ramblings in the night: and a tiny pinch of irony


When Somer called me up and asked if I could do a job with Teresa on the 20th I said, “Sure. Why not?” I hadn’t crossed paths with that Gemini woman since that one dark night at Sandy Station. We were all still young, and full of life back then. But things turned ugly on that night. Bad things happened. Things that aren’t quite fit for print, and which I will never be fully prepared to explain, even to myself. Let’s just say that I humbly pray, every night, that no one captured that scene on video. Youtube isn’t ready for that sort of weirdness.


There is a short list of people who have managed to work their ways into my crazy, inner consciousness to the point that I can truly call them the right kind of people. These are the ones who have been with me in all the wrong places at all the right times. So even if I haven’t seen them since the year 2004, I still know that if I run into them tomorrow morning we will still be friends. These once in a blue moon friendships are the best kind, because if they were not then they would have fallen by the wayside a long, long time ago. It’s easy to be friends with someone you see every day. It's another thing completely to be friends with someone you see only once a year.


I believe I have been to Teresaland only about 4 times in the past four years. I will list them now just for chronological reasons.


1) The Infamous Arches Spectacle - We took some crude photos, for strictly academic reasons, but quickly degenerated into drunken hijinks that got us all in the worst sort of trouble with one very stern school teacher.


2) The Khan Wedding - Wherein we demonstrated complete professionalism and grace in spite of some very intense sociological vibes. Unfortunately we did not get into any sort of trouble at that time.



3) The Wedding of Chesie & Tosh - Almost completely unexceptional, except that it stressed us both out so bad that we were doomed to fall directly into the Great Sandy Station Fiasco.



4) South Jordan Anonymous Wedding - A long, long session of rainy photography, followed by a weird, dark night of the soul in South Salt Lake.



So I went down to South Jordan, on a bitter cold summer’s day in June, to shoot a backyard wedding. It was all very moist. Nevertheless, we had a job to do, and like Lee Van Cleef we saw it through. The most disturbing part is that even now, after all is said and done, I have no idea what the names are of the bride or the groom, or anyone else who was there for that matter.


That’s just how we roll.


But this is all just a bunch of rambling about things no one ever understands, like phone phobias, and the problems that come with the ongoing attempt to converge our various styles. You just had to be there to know what I am talking about. But we do understand, because we were both there, looking through our respective objective, and subjective, lenses. (Ha! If you weren’t lost before that last sentence, you certainly should be by now).


Anyway, to make a long story short, it turns out that Teresa and I have been living within 100 meters of each other for a little while now, unbeknownst to both of us. How can this happen, you ask, in this wondrous age of communications? For well over a year I have not seen Teresa a single time, and yet all I had to do was look out my window at the right moment, and I would have seen her walking her dog past my building. And yet, I still had to drive all the way down to South Jordan, in the pouring rain, to figure that out. And that, my friends, truly is ironic.