And sometimes I think I feel too much; other times I feel I think too much. Fortunately tonight, I neither think nor feel any of it matters very much either way.
</:D
With More Soon,
Rock Steady Los Angeles
It’s 10:40 pm on a Thursday night, and I didn’t make it to the night’s writing circle, instead finding myself splattered in bed after a gracious nap which my body apparently needed. I woke up and rolled over to read a text from my friend, who said her favorite picture from the other night was the one I took of the Wiltern’s display menu, which on the night that I photographed it was featuring Kendrick Lamar, who was performing at the venue that very evening.
I then rubbed my eyes for a second, and thought about the photo-walk. I took a look at the pictures on J.T, and saw that my favorite was the first one, which was a photo of a mother and her son as they walked holding hands through the dimly lit streets of Koreatown.
The truth though, is that the whole series was my favorite. I went through about 178 photos to get to the 12 that I’d publish, which itself took hours of sorting long after the shoot, and when I finally selected the dozen, I edited each photo into the night, even as I knew I’d lose sleep for the next day’s work schedule.
Less sleep was worth it; it was a matter of survival: JIMBO TIMES’s survival, man.
As the month has passed and the year comes to an end, it’s become more difficult to devote and honor time to J.T.
If I’m not working, I’m eating after another day at work, and if I’m not eating, I’m lying on the floor somewhere, taking it all in. On the few days I get to myself, I fight for my art — for J.T., but it’s an incredibly demanding fight, and there are a million and one reasons to give it up and kick it to the curb.
The honeymoon phase is over, after all; people have heard of J.T., ‘liked’ it, and moved on. I’ve moved on as well from the initial phase, in my own way.
It’s not like last year when I was fresh out of college, and when I was just looking for a new foundation to immerse myself in as I rekindled life in L.A.
Today, I’ve got the foundations I was looking for, including my family, a solid group of friends and colleagues, and work. But now it’s a matter of keeping these things, and who knew it takes so much work to hold steady in a world that keeps moving, as if the wind itself is ready to whisk it all away the second we let go?
Who knew that every day is planting another seed for our dreams in a city that’s filled with them already, and which makes no guarantee that ours will be the exception to the endless waiting everyone else has to bear?
JIMBO TIMES is the seed, and the foundation that I fight for. No matter how worn down I might get along the way, every new day I stand up for it again.
Note to Self: On Writing One Day
Writers are like most people: always in transition, always in one place before the next. Sometimes we can express that, and other times we have to wait a little while before doing so; we’re always writing, however. Whether we make our experiences immediately into text or not, our thoughts are a current from which nothing ever really disappears, but where experiences only transform into something else at another place and time for us to draw from.
When your time arrives, you’ll know –or your fingertips will know– through the same magical process that leads you to walk out and face the world each morning. And you know that feeling, and how it will be more than just beautiful. You know how it will make up for every moment of the merciless drought, when –even if only for a moment– you’ll be the greatest writer in the world: the one which everyone’s been waiting for; or at least, the one that you’ve been waiting for.
One day. One step at a time.
J.T.
Mind Over Matter in L.A.
It looks to be a warm Saturday in Los Angeles today, which should make for a hell of a day over at Starbucks! It’s going to be frappuccino madness and whipped cream extravaganza. Earlier this morning though, I forgot I was scheduled to work. For a slight second, my time as a barista was lost somewhere, as a part of some other life.
The thing is, for the last few weeks I’ve gotten up early on most mornings for work, and in all the rush and daze of breakfast and showering and running to the bus or the car (because I switch it up), I’ve known quite clearly my purpose for the day. In turn, to get up late this morning and forget that I was scheduled to work at around 1 was to find myself in a gray space.
I was another person, again.
And it was a strange thing, but it was also a great thing, to be lost in the wilderness of not knowing what to make of myself.
It had just dawned on me the other day, as I was speaking to a co-worker: how it’s natural to think of work as work for money, but less natural to think of work as an effort to get away from ourselves. Sometimes it’s both. But for myself, more often than not I think it’s the latter!
Some days, when I get up and head over to Starbucks, I’m just grateful. Not because there’s money to be earned, but because there’s a function to perform there, and that’s all. The function to perform is something other than myself to focus on, and that’s a gift, especially on the days I feel empty.
This morning, then, I guess I felt emptiness again. In the moment I sat up, not knowing where to go or what the agenda for the day was, my body was a temple with all of its materials misplaced. My mind was chilly air inside. Rather than running from the offset temple, though, I held steady, as if to pause and reflect before the great mystery of my being, of my essence.
Everything which has happened up to this point –with work, with friends, and even with J.T.– it has both placed and misplaced me. The great discovery is still waiting for me, which makes everywhere I’ve been and everywhere else I’m supposed to go just one sequence of events out of a myriad of possibilities.
By extension, then, the strange temple is the universe. The mind is the indefinite depth contained by the universe. Today, as I get to spend another day with these things, it doesn’t matter whether it’s at Starbucks, or at home, or anywhere of a dozen other places I can be; today the emptiness is a gift. I choose to make it that.
In Laav
Summer is in full swing in L.A., and it gives the day a longer, lazier feeling. Or at least, that’s what yours truly has been able to enjoy. I’m truly privileged to still be out and about as a free bird, but like everything else, my freedom has its time too, and I can now see a nest and some nesting time not far off in the distance.
It’s been a pleasure to roam around in my return to The City, however. On the one hand, L.A. is as heartbreaking as ever, marred by a sense of disconnection between all the different drivers bubbled up in their cars, and a hunger for community between so many of the lovely but lonely Spanish homes spread throughout the landscape.
On the other hand, although L.A.’s communities might be separated from another, it doesn’t mean they’re not vibrating brilliantly behind closed doors and fences! I’ve had the fortune to reconnect with a few of these communities since getting back, and they’re as reinvigorated by the summer heat as I am.
As the days continue, then, once again it’s the most fascinating thing in the world to find the stories in between the separation, which never fail to bridge the gaps between The City with their hidden but precious connections to one another. A friend put it best the other day, when he told me that stories give him company. I realized that hey, that’s what J.T.’s all about, and I totally just stole the line from him just now!
With Laav,