Peering Through the Darkness

Early April 2011, in Long Island NY.  This is a photo of Ashyndeton.

I'm taking a pause through my forward momentum to chronologically catch up with my life through photos to upload some pictures that were mostly taken of me or things I did, primarily taken by Darren Hartman (pictured here).

April was a crazy month in my life.  2011 itself was pretty nuts for me.  My band had just recorded and pressed a vinyl EP, our first recordings.  I was in the process of transitioning my office job to a work-at-home job, so I could facilitate my move with my friends to Portland, OR, in late July.  A month prior, the Fukushima disaster occurred, and was likely still going on.  A year prior, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill had happened.  Things on planet earth seemed generally dismal - the myth of 2012 seemed to be more likely as time went on, due to all of the terrible environmental disasters that were occurring in those few years.  I had also been in midst of producing a film that I was to write and direct, for a friend's senior thesis project in film school (he would be the cinematographer, though it was a little more me dictating the visuals as well and just trying to teach him hands on what to do and why for particular things).

In the years prior, I had lost most of the weight I would lose (~100lbs), and shed that skin to become this other person.  Just as I became that person, I joined a band, became another person, and then decided to move across the country with that band/my friends, and once again "shed my skin", so to speak, in leaving behind my roots and the bridges I had built in the East Coast of the United States - to go towards a place where I had never been, where nobody I knew lived besides the friends I would move with.