Why am I awake at this ungodly hour? It’s saturday morning. I should be drunk, passed out with my arms around some beautiful woman I don’t deserve. I should have partied all night with my friends.

Instead, I’m here in a town in north carolina in a town who’s name I can’t spell right (albamarle? albermar? something). Today, I’m going to go and sit in a chair for hours on end, and take pictures. This instead of waking up with said woman, making breakfast and nursing a hangover all day, orange juice, eggs, coffee, maybe a mid-afternoon bike ride.

No, today I’ll shoot more than 10,000 pictures. I’ll hear the same 50 songs repeated about twice, some more than others, and some more annoyingly than others (I never did like Annie). I’ll hold up the 5 pound camera setup for most of that time, a 12-13 hour day, with a short break for lunch. I’ll be exhausted and ache at the end and probably have one dinner choice, because everything else in town shuts down at 8.

The strangest part? I prefer this to staying at home. I’d rather be out here on the edge of what I can do, busting my ass, trying to do something nearly impossible (produce good art on demand, several hundred times in a day? that’s so absurd it’s beyond consideration, but here we are). This is difficult, but it’s the life I’ve been missing out on in a lot of ways, going different places, doing photography, a little suffering but much joy.

Other than the people in what I’m already thinking of as my old life, there’s nothing I miss. With the exception of the hypothetical pretty lady, who 9/10ths of the time I’m texting from the road anyway. What’s wrong with me?

Posted by Matt on 2009-02-14T00:00:00Z GMT