Selling Yesterday

"Sarge, with your permission, I'd like to lob a snowball over the top of the frame and into the house. ... Damn, I didn't make it!"

They were burning old buildings at UAF yesterday. I expected them to turn me and my camera away, and I was all set to Play The Journalist Card (where I show them a business card and say I'm a journalist), but they turned out to not care. At all. There were plenty of spectators, and they let me get so close I had to cover my face with my scarf to tolerate the heat.

"Every house has a dragon," one of the firefighters told another one. "True story -- you need a good camera to catch it, but if you look at your photos afterwards, and you took a picture at the right time, you'll see it.

"Damn, I forgot to save the Jetsons chimney!" he then exclaimed, pointing at a bright red chimney sticking out of the house. "It's such a Jetsons fireplace." He hummed the Jetsons theme, and pointed out how the heat hadn't even made the paint flake off the chimney.

Walking back to my car, I realized I'd spent more time taking pictures and thinking about how to anecdotize it than I'd spent actually experiencing it. When did I start commodifying my experiences? When did my stories become a form of capital?

Posted by DJ Ten Ninjas on Sunday, March 19, 2006 at 6:01 PM | Permalink