Paparazzi to the Pets

As we all know, I have this slick new camera, which I love and baby and take with me everywhere. The only problem is that I'm rapidly running out of things to photograph. Everyone in the world has now seen every inch of my backyard, often in excruciating super macro detail, and they've seen that particular trail I take in Bent Creek almost as often. Clearly, I need more subjects.

I wish I had the guts to photograph people, but I don't, except for my children, who are, alas, well aware of my obsessions and so manifest a tendency to dive under the couch whenever a camera appears. Little savages: they think I'm stealing their souls or, worse, I might post an embarrassing picture of them on the internets. I'm too shy and paranoid to ask strangers if I can take their picture, even when the perfect subject presents herself, like the heavyset lady parading down Haywood Road in an extremely vivid housedress, bouffant curls and small rat like dog on the end of a very long leash.

So I photograph animals. Mostly Theo and Mr. Bill, over and over, to the point where they, too, duck when the camera comes out, but that doesn't stop me, I just stalk them. I've branched out and started stalking other peoples' animals too: I'm even fantasizing about a no doubt lucrative new career as a Pet Photographer. Doesn't that sound gruesome? I'd have to increase my drinking a lot to cope with that one. I've been trying to take pictures of wild animals, but wild animals are more camera shy than Madonna at the supermarket. Years ago when I lived in Maryland I had a vegetable garden that was being eaten nightly by the huge old groundhog we called Mr. Snuffles (we eventually started calling her Mrs. Snuffles, but that's another story.) I put up a fence around the garden and was startled, when I came home the next day, to find it had worked brilliantly: there was Mrs. Snuffles, trapped inside the garden by the new fence. So I spent about an hour walking around the outside of the fence, with her frantically pacing me on the inside, me talking in a calm and reasonable voice about how she could probably get out here, or here, or, uh, just let me lift this up AAAGHHH!! and her making noises that indicated her plans to kill me and eat my brains. Finally I said, fuck this, I'm taking pictures, and went to get my camera. The minute she saw that camera, she was OUT of there, through the fence and into the woods at speeds you wouldn't think a groundhog could achieve. Obviously, the paparazzi had burned her before and she had never recovered from that National Geographic spread.

Becoming one of the paparazzi can mess with your mind. Last night I went out to smoke a cigarette and at the bottom of the stairs was Mr. Bill - with a large dead gray thing, possibly a rat, possibly a bird, possibly, who knows? Maybe the Gnome King: I didn't get close enough to find out. Mr. Bill was, as far as I could tell, reenacting the whole hunt and kill for an interested audience of Theo and the dogs next door. He kept tossing his pet corpse up into the air and snatching it back, jumping on it and generally behaving in a way that I pretty much wish I hadn't seen, because this is the cat who sleeps on my knees every night. If I was in my right mind, I wouldn't have watched. Not only did I watch, I went to get the camera. Then, and you can all be thankful here, I came to my senses and stopped myself. Even the paparazzi must know when to back away and also, being out there would have involved having the door open, which might have led to the dead thing being in the living room, and that would have been bad, bad, bad. I am not taking any more pictures of corpses.

Unless they're way photogenic corpses, that is.