A million billion years ago at the nicest hotel in a town whose name I can’t remember somewhere in Bolivia.

The room cost like $20 a night. I bought the camera that made this photo a couple days before I got on the plane and it broke halfway through the trip. It was bitter cold and I was underprepared for the weather. I don’t know why they didn’t drain this pool. Shortly after I took this, a huge dust storm rolled through town and we hid inside our tiny room punishing ourselves with a Hannah Montana movie because it was the only thing we could find in English.

My memory works off of visual cues from photos. I don’t remember people so well, places I’ve been, things I ate, just photos of them that I took or looked at. I don’t know if this is some kind of learned response from reflexively taking pictures for more than a decade or if my brain is a little broken.

The downside is that all the gone people are flat laid in my mind’s eye. One dimensional fractions of seconds instead of flesh and blood and movement and sound. I guess it’s better than nothing but it feels a little sad and a little empty. I guess I’m glad I’ve got memories at all.

Does your brain work this way? What does a memory feel like to you? What does it look like?

I took this photo years ago when I was young and green, before I bought a “real” camera, before I had any idea of where all this chasing of light and form could take me. 

I was driving across the country, living in a van with a street magician and trying to find my own little piece of the wild blue yonder. 

This is the home of  strangers father. The stranger was a tough looking guy I met in a bar in Oakland. I remember  talking about heroin, I remember talking about Bradley Nowell, I remember talking about how difficult it was to find a shower on the road when you lived in a vehicle. 

That was the reason I found myself here. In search of cleanliness in a house full of beautiful clutter. 

This photo was all instinct. I didn’t take note of it until years later. With a more seasoned eye, with a heavier heart it caught my attention while I was flipping through my archive. 

This is how memories look to me. All golden light and old dusty things and warmth. They’re beautiful half truths that I can take apart and live inside of for a few seconds when the “real” world becomes too much.

If I were a trucker this would be my mighty steed. It’s all done up in the color my mother painted our house when I was a kid. The same color my family adopted as our own.  It’s nostalgia and horsepower and the open road. All things I love and respect. 

About to start another project. I’m standing at the edge, the jump off point. This undertaking feels almost too big, bigger than me. So, I thought it might be a good idea to explore my roots first and find the kernel, the origin space that all of this came from. I’m trying to pull a little nod from the past that it is indeed okay to move forward into an abstract future.