What It Takes to Gather

All too rarely do the people in the Las Vegas television and film industry get together. We do have an annual Christmas party, which was created in honor of an untimely death of a fellow co worker, this reason generally tends to be the only rallying point of people lately, shameful though that none of can find the time to hangout, granted we are all out there on the hunt for some work in a city that has undergone a serious economic recession, so maybe people feel like they are in competition, hopefully that is not the case, though I asked a few people at last night's rememberance of a video engineer who passed away last weekend at all too early of a time and the fact he was partially key in my education in this industry made the evening a bit more sad. I stared at the photo of him and it just did not fully set in that he would no longer be walking out of the video portion of the television truck praising me for a job well done. Thankfully, his wisdom and guidance will live with me, so in my mind he is still alive, a bit of him in all of us here tonight, discipline, focus, and attention to detail. Those lessons came over a decade of being thrown in over my head, where he was my immidiate superior, shaking his head as I did everything wrong, still mistakes were only made once, after a dressing down that left my ears stinging with a look as if I just fell from the sky unable to process his command without looking dumbfound.

Over time, I just shut up, observed, and paid attention gaining lifetimes of experience. it has served me well. After talking to a few more co workers it seemed unamious in the realization that as a community we were pretty distant, spread out, and factioned, this could be due to generational differences, social circles, and personal tastes, yet why should these things seperate us, maybe living in Vegas has made people somewhat transient. I can remember last weekend when everyone on a television shoot found out the news, the sense of loss was complete and irrefutable, total shock, I was hanging out with him the weekend before, then boom, gone, no more, everyone moves on, goes about their business, thankfully though last night his memory would not be lost, so Riceman shall be a wealth of knowledge, eternal, purposeful, and a legacy of the personal desire for perfection.