Good day today.

Oh, good day.

Woke up and didn't really need to hustle to get anywhere. Hung out, watched some TV on DVD, left the volume up too high, bugged the hell out of Alicia. All in typical married morning.

It was headshot day today, and the photographer I picked out (who now appears in my Relevant Links section) specifically said to get good rest the day before.

The appointment was at 1300, so I packed up a ton of clothes (read: basically my whole closet, because I haven't got too many clothes), packed it into the car and took off for Burbank.

Oddly enough, the little theatre where he shoots is just down the street from Bob Hope airport, which I had to find in order to turn in the rental car I took home from trucking. So, it was easy to find.

When I got there he was just finishing up a reshoot with another client. It was one of those awkward moments that you can never avoid when meeting somebody new for some kind of project...but that was pretty much the worst part of the day.

The clothes I had offered good options, and he said that my skin looked good and that he was digging my hair. The man's married with two kids, so don't read that the wrong way. What's notable about that is: I've been a trucker for a year and a half. The last time I had reasonably attractive hair and skin that was anything close to clear, I had a Wisconsin zip code.

So I threw on the first set of clothes he wanted to shoot, and we got started.

He explained that we were going to shoot about 700 frames, and that there was no pressure, because it's a digital shoot, which allows tremendous flexibility to take a quick look and lose the ones that missed the focus or the depth of field. He said that the first hundred shots were the ones we'd use to get used to each other, "so they'll all be shit, but that's how it goes."

About seven shots in, he stopped and checked his preview screen and went, "well, that one was great! We got one."

It wasn't idle flattery, it was genuine surprise and satisfaction.

"Look at the way your eyes pop," he showed me, "that's nice."

It went on like this. We talked about life and the business and everything in between, and we shot a lot of stuff in a few different places around the block, in several different looks. It felt good to know that I'm easy to work with, and it felt good to have somebody tell me I had a good marketable look and really mean it. It felt good to feel on track.

I know that Hollywood is a place that smells of horse manure from a thousand miles away, so before you raise the doubt that I might have fallen into a pile of it, let me assure you that my BS radar is pretty sensitive, and I didn't catch any red flags. The man asked my permission to use some of my shots on his new website.

In all, today just served to reinforce a few core beliefs I have about this whole Hollywood thing. 1) There are people out there, doing this, that care about it the way I do, and that aren't vapid hairdos. 2) Showing up, and showing up, and showing up makes a difference.

Into traffic, and see what runs me over.