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.
[…] college graduate at that time, getting used to managing these different elements for J.T. was a learning curve. Nevertheless, in Bah’!, I declare my love for what it all showed me about myself. And […]