Shoot the Moon (1999 - 2009)

In 2002 I was twenty-three years old. David Lamb and I were leaving the blood bank in Seattle where we went twice a week to make 45 dollars selling our blood. We'd ride the bus through the dark and grey days, home to the house on Keystone where David would sit in the basement recording folk songs into a broken tape recorder while his wife, my little brother and I wandered the city taking pictures. We were broke. I sold my blood to buy expired Polaroid film where I could find it and when that didn't work I would steal it. I had started carrying an old Polaroid SX70 camera with me everywhere I went back in 1999. We had no jobs, we had no plan, we had piled 6 of us and a dog into a van and had driven straight across from Massachusetts to Washington for no reason other than to find a new place to live.

Before that we had all lived on an island 10 miles off the coast of New Hampshire. Now we were hungry most of the time; it was starting to wear on us. I told David that this was to be the plan: No plan. I said we'd ‘Shoot The Moon.’ Like in the game of Hearts, you collect all the bad cards you win, you get almost all of them but not all you lose. So I started collecting my cards in the frame of a Polaroid. Sleeping on the beach in California, getting sun stroke with Tim hitchhiking north along I89, running freight and trash on an old lobster boat with Danger Dave as my captain, moving back and forth across the country, living in my friends closet's when I ran out of money, moving to Serbia with Casey because we didn't like Boston, running around strange cities at night, watching my friends die, watching my friends love each other curled up together on a couch in the morning sun. This was our life, it wasn't mine anymore, I was just following it where it went and we were nomads. This belongs to the people in the photos as much as it belongs to me.

And so that is what this is, it's 10 years of no plan, of wandering around with a Polaroid camera. Some of these are the people who I walked with and some are the people whose paths I crossed. The times when things seemed most desperate are when I felt most alive; like waking up shivering on piles of life jackets in the hull of a boat next to Sohrob and thinking it was the most wonderful place to be, because I felt alive, and that was what mattered. Since I was a teenager watching my older brother ride freight trains around the country I have always said the only reason to live is for what I would call a “life lived”; a life full of experiences either good or bad. So we'd win by taking the wrong way, we would wander, gather these experiences one by one and build something out of them.