SLUMP

I have been in a slump, a HUGE one. Some days it is lame stories, other days good stories but the reporter does not give a damn, occasionally I do not give a damn. But I think I am cured.

After the NPPA Oklahoma Workshop and a week at the NCAA Final Four, I was exhausted. Mentally, physically, and creatively. The workshop gave me so many great tools to use, the Final Four gave me the opportunity to use them, and then it was back to life as normal. I think this is what people who win a little jackpot in the lottery go through. For a few weeks you go bizerk, buying things you could never afford and did not even want before the financial windfall. Then one day the mailman rings the doorbell and hands you a seven pound MasterCard bill and reality smacks you upside the head as you try to fit back into your old budget of $40 per week for groceries.

After the Final Four, shooting the Durham city council voting on a downtown redistricting plan did not have the same high to it as three packages and five liveshots a day on a sporting event with nationwide interest. At first I diagnosed it as a narcissistic complex, in other words, I was getting too big for my britches. I went through that slump when I moved from KOAT's main Albuquerque station to the Santa Fe bureau a year ago. It lasted about three weeks and then I figured out that the type of news I was covering had changed and I need to change with it (no more lead stories, no more juicy features, just solid fact based government stories---which now I love to do). But this time around I did not care if I shot the lead story or not, maybe it was plain old apathy. That was a phase I experienced two years ago just before I moved off of shooting the overnight shift and reporting for the morning show to working swing shift (2:30 to 10:30PM). I would hear a shooting or stabbing over the scanner and as I headed to certain parts of Albuquerque, I would think to myself, "It's just evolution at work, why are we wasting our viewers time with this?"

Of course from February to mid October, I would go to an average of four violent crimes a night usually one at 11PM when I first got in at night, another around 2AM when the bars closed, the next at 4AM (you could set your watch by that one) and one right at sunrise. That got very old after a year and I quickly learned that most of these crimes were connected to drugs or gangs. But this time I still cared about what I put on the air, so I ruled out apathy. Could it just be this time of year I am used to a big change and this year (hopefully) there will not be one? Maybe my internal clock was gearing down before a big change that has seemed to happen every year at this time and my brain forgot to tell it that this year we are staying put (other than hopefully moving to a better neighborhood in a few months).

When I was in high school and college, May signified when I would go from the schedule of school during daylight hours and work at night, to work all the time.

It was seven years ago Thursday, May 13, that I began my bizarre existence at KOAT. I still remember every detail about that day, from the khaki outfit I wore to Oprah talking about reuniting a family as I sat in the front lobby waiting for Janet Blair to take me into the newsroom. I thought that building was so glamorous that day, with it's text book late 1970's architecture and painting scheme to the eight foot mirrored K-O-A-T that spanned the front lobby. All I ever wanted up until that point was to work for Channel 7, and it was about to begin. Jeff Martinez, I know you are reading this, you walked through those heavy glass doors about four minutes after I did, it was your first day too. What twisted and rocky paths we took to get where we are, did you ever imagine seven years ago you would be in Chicago? Seven years ago I could not have found Raleigh, North Carolina on a map in four minutes, much less imagine living here.

Six years ago in May, I moved from interning at KOAT's Albuquerque main station to interning at the Roswell bureau. Five years ago this May, I went from working part-time in the Roswell bureau and commuting from Portales where I went to classes in the morning and worked the early morning shift in Master Control at KENW to living in Roswell and working full time as the swingshift reporter for the summer. It was four years ago this May I resigned from KOAT after a nasty battle with the news director (I was not pretty enough or ethnic enough to work in his Roswell bureau) and went to KVIA in El Paso, Texas as the weekend assignment editor (six months was enough of that, and I took a job at the cable company in advertising). It was three years ago this May that I had grown bored working at the cable company and started fishing around to work at local radio stations (I went back to KOAT three months later). And as I mentioned earlier, two years ago I went from overnight reporting to swing shift shooting, and a year ago I returned the bureau life. This year I am going no where. I don't foresee a career change, much less even a schedule change.

For the first time in my career, radio and TV, I do not have any passion projects resting on the back burner. There are a half dozen tapes in my locker from KOAT of stories that are half shot. They were the stories I would think about when I was trapped at a crime scene or waiting for city council to convene. There is the Route 66 neon artist, this guy who has a neon gallery on Central Avenue in Albuquerque and keeps the glorious old signs of the Mother Road blazing in the darkness of their hey-day. I needed rain at night to shoot the story, so the signs would reflect off the pavement and fill twice as much screen. Of course Albuquerque has suffered from droughts the past three summers and what rain came, fell in the early afternoon and evaporated before sundown. I have about ten minutes of tape shot for that one. Then there is Luminaria Graveyard. This is a story I discovered three Christmases ago as I drove around Albuquerque at 2AM on Christmas Eve. There is a cemetery at the Big I, where Interstates 25 and 40 meet in downtown Albuquerque. Each Christmas Eve, hundreds of families decorate the grave sites of their fallen ones with thousands of paper bags filled with sand and candles. It is one of those things in life that is so beautiful, it hurts your eyes to look at it. The first year I shot at the grave yard, I kept scaring myself and jumping back in the car hoping the wandering spirits would not get me. Your mind plays funny tricks on you at 3AM on Christmas Eve in a glowing graveyard. The second year I went there during the day and interviewed families about the meaning of decorating the graves. They would leave food, presents, even liquor at the head stones along with the luminarias, just to let their deceased family member know they were thinking of them. This third year, I planned on shooting the processions that go through the grave yard during the night and sing to the spirits. But instead I was in Raleigh this third year. The man who fills the lone Coke machine beckoning weary travelers along a 90 mile stretch of nothing on highway 70, the decrepit WPA buildings of Acme, New Mexico, the secret churches of the Crypto-Jews, so many stories I intended to tell, but not enough time and tape.

I don't recall ever having a slump other than during this time of year. Maybe the slump came out of knowing there would be no changes this year. I really have no idea other than I am relieved to be over it.

For anyone who has been fortunate enough not to have been in a slump, this is what mine was like this time. Most days I would be given a story (conceiving the Y2K baby or take your pets to work on Fridays) and it would sound great. But then when we started shooting the story, the pieces would not come together, or the reporter would get bored with the story and cut me short on shooting time and for some reason I would not stand up to them and say something like, "Why don't you go wait in the car---trunk---while I shoot your story." Other days I would get a story like "new noise ordinance goes into effect tomorrow, how will it affect night clubs in residential areas?" And after hours of door knocking and badgering club owners, we would find out no one knows about the ordinance, the police do not plan on enforcing it and the people in the neighborhoods were not concerned about the noise in the first place. I had a few stories that were great other than one or two little technical things that the average viewer at home would not notice, but I dwelled on them (mic cords showing, lighting that was a little harsh, slow editing pace).

But beyond the tape that made it on the air, my slump stemmed from a lack of people who made my heart beat faster. I could not find anyone to care about. There were people who I would connect with for a few minutes, but at the end of the day I could not remember their names. But last week cured me. I went to Fort Dix, New Jersey for four days. We were following the 300+ troops from Fort Bragg, NC deployed there to set up the refugee camp for the plane loads of displaced people coming to America from Kosovo. I do not want to lump their story in with me whining about my slump, their story is far too powerful to have such a self absorbed lead-in.

It feels good to be excited to go to work in a few hours. If it takes having a few weeks of mental down time every April to make the rest of the year shine, I will take it, it's cheaper than therapy and a good reason to eat ice cream.

Behind the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism
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