It’s funny how stressed out I’ve gotten myself over a self-imposed shooting schedule. I decided I’d like to upload a mere three photos a week to a photoblog to encourage me to take more pictures, and when my girlfriend reminded me I needed to shoot a photo for Sunday night’s update, it felt like it was high school again and I had just realized I had forgotten to write a paper that was due the next morning. Hopefully as I shoot more, I’ll build up a “buffer” of photos to upload so I’m not shooting photos just minutes before updating my photoblog, but I went out today really worried about taking a good photo. This, of course, put me in a really forced mindset in which I was shooting a bunch of cliche bullshit; I’m pretty embarrassed of a lot of the stuff sitting on my memory card right now.

And this was only because my original plan fell through. See, my original plan was to take a good skate photo today. I live less than two miles up the street from arguably the most famous skatepark in the world — there’s no reason I couldn’t come back with a ton of great skate photos, right? But then I remembered we’re talking about Burnside park here, and Portland produces a very special breed of skate rat.

Long story short, Gundo and I were positive — for several minutes, mind you — that we had found a dead body (Kyle swore he saw the body breathing. I personally didn’t see it move, even on close-up, careful inspection, but I took Kyle’s word for it because I really didn’t want to find a dead body — turns out it was just some seriously passed out kid), and the toothless paparazzi control guard was on duty today. Either way, it was a nice ice-breaker to learn that yes, you can go down under Burnside bridge without getting stabbed (in fact, there were quite a few tourist-y spectator types there) and that even “the good skaters” are approachable. If you checked Moon Plantation tonight, you’ll notice that the photo is not skateboard-related. Or even at Burnside (well, Burnside Park, anyway…the bokeh in the background of the new photo is actually streetlights on Burnside). We left, a little disappointed, after I snapped this turd of a photo, but were relieved to discover our dead friend was shambling around, brushing gravel out of his hair and trying to figure out where he was and what was going on.

On the way back home, I shot some more tripe and went home to edit it into something usable. Nothing ever came of it, and I instead opted to shoot a Pabst can out of Kyle’s window several hours later. Boring, but a zillion times better than anything I shot this afternoon. Anyway, I was then later trying to describe to Cameron where Kyle and I found the “body,” and my drawing of a section of the park turned into a pretty sweet collaborative effort to depict Burnside’s totally radical radicality. Behold, and that is all.