My boss hit me up the other day the way he sometimes checks in to let me know what the biz is like - a few photos and a couple of words. Door plaques, bridges, covers of magazines, stuff that looks like the endless chaff of camera checks, b-roll, and accidental shots that survive only as trimmed negatives in the deep, scattered reservoirs of human photography lining the bottom drawers and attic boxes of the world.

The guy is my sifu's sifu's sifu, and he can pack a lot of information into a hastily framed photograph.

After spending fifteen or twenty minutes picking out details and asking the sky brain for background information, I saw the next potential adventure, and I saw, at the very least, a well and a septic tank waiting to be had. The price would be the same it always is - keep a bag packed and be ready to go, on zero notice, to flog alien technology with bone clubs in some place that got the tits bombed off it in recent memory.

I'm so glad my boss found me. The work is infrequent but it isn't boring and it isn't dirty.

I can go tickle the dragon's tail by doing something weird and not have to pay for it with a naked short on a stranger's blood.