I love using a camera.

Let me repeat…I fucking love using a camera. And I really fucking love using a camera slightly buzzed from beer or, in the case of today, tequila. “Get the cameraman tequila!”

I don’t know why it excites me so much but I love finding the angle on something, the shot, the moment in time that was perfect.

It’s exciting and makes me smile.

I bring this up because I was taking pictures of a christening and some video of the mariachis they had there and it was just so damn much fun even though I wasn’t making or changing the world with an image. It wasn’t spectacular but it was fun.

Driving to this place where the coffee and the internet is kept., the office as it were, I had strange and unexpected flashback to being about eight years old and wanting a camera. Eventually I got an snazzy 110 instamatic…frame the shot, take the picture, develop the film, ogle your work.

I’d forgotten about all that for decades now. I’d forgotten that I used to take pictures of the alley cats in the yard of the apartment building where I grew up. I forgot about loving finding the shot although I didn’t have the words for it at the time. I forgot about that peculiar passion until an hour ago when I realized just how much fun it was to me.

And it must me fun to me because I volunteered to help someone yesterday to shoot something on the banks of a stream filled with sewage. If that isn’t dedication, I don’t know what it could be.

Anyway, I love taking photos. I loved taking them when I was a kid and I forgot about that until moments ago.

It is curious though. Why would I have forgotten about that fun for so long? What happened decades ago that made me lose interest, lost hope and go down a path that was born of self-destruction and desolation? What the fuck happened to me that made me lose myself?

It’s so weird.