Category: Life Stories
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Ordinary
I wish I had more photographs of Tuesdays. That’s probably a strange thing for a photographer to say. I’ve spent more than thirty years taking pictures of things people decided were important enough to remember. Weddings, events, portraits, horses, celebrations and all those moments when somebody thinks, We should get a picture of this. But…
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Unexpected
Very little about my life has gone according to plan. This is particularly annoying because I really fucking like plans. Today, for example, I woke up with a sour stomach. I had plans to go out with my girl, and my body was telling me that something was going on with my digestive system and…
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Belonging
Being 6’7″, I’ve spent most of my adult life not fitting into shit. Airplane seats. Cars. Hotel beds. Clothing racks. Doorways occasionally become an unexpected adventure. At six-foot-seven, “one size fits all” has always felt a little fucking optimistic. Physically not fitting somewhere is pretty easy to recognize. The other kind takes longer. I’ve been…
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Wonder
Somewhere along the way, humanity spent billions of dollars launching satellites into space so I could use them to find a Tupperware container hidden behind a tree. Think about that for a minute. There are machines traveling thousands of miles per hour above my head, communicating with a computer I’m carrying in my pocket, calculating…
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Savor
I eat too fast. I always have. Put a plate of food in front of me and apparently I’m concerned someone is going to take it away. When I was younger, my father, God rest his soul, used to tell me not to wash my food down. He’d watch me take a bite and immediately…
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Fragility
When I was a wee lad, my mother told us not to roughhouse in the front room because we might break the figurines she had purchased for decoration. She had said it before, probably many times, but that didn’t stop my brother and me from throwing pillows around the room with wild abandon. Eventually we…
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Ridiculous
I own several Raspberry Pis. For those unfamiliar with them, a Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer originally designed to help people learn about computers. I apparently interpreted this as a challenge to see how many completely unnecessary things I could make one do. I have spent hours configuring a $70 computer to perform a…
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Indulgence
When I think of this word, the first thing that comes to mind is Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour, an American ice cream parlor and sandwich chain that was founded in Portland, Oregon, in 1963. The parlors had an early 1900s theme, with employees wearing period dress and straw boater hats, and each location featured a player piano. From…
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Practice
Puberty hit me so hard that I went from a normal child to a walking disaster of awkward angles and sudden loud noises. I didn’t grow up; I was violently assembled like IKEA furniture with missing instructions. Growing in general was painful and full of surprises, but what I went through over the course of…
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Possibility
While I was still a teenager, I was at a basketball game watching my school dominate another team when I noticed someone underneath the hoop taking action shots of the players. During a free throw, I heard the sound of the motor drive going off and thought to myself “That looks like fun!”. I approached…
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Spontaneity
Many years ago, my best friend and I went on a road trip along with our girlfriends. The trip was planned at about 8pm, we were on the road by 10pm, and we arrived around 6am in Nampa, Idaho. There was no real planning, no rhyme or reason to where we would stay or what…