April/ May 2016 (Seattle& Brooklyn)

In April/ May of 2016, I was living in a strange in-between state. I wasn’t fully in New York, but I wasn’t fully in Seattle either. I was bouncing between Seattle & Brooklyn & Queens like my body couldn’t decide where it wanted to land, but my mind was already sprinting ahead. This month was one of those transitional chapters where the “real life” parts were moving around constantly, but the art stayed steady. If anything, it grew faster.

At the time, I was designing marijuana labels for farms in Washington State. It was honest work, creative work, the kind of design grind that teaches you discipline. Labels might seem small from the outside, but when you’re really doing it right it’s a full world. You’re building identity for a product from nothing. Fonts, composition, mood, symbolism, color choices; all the little decisions that make something feel legitimate & alive. I was learning how to translate energy into visuals, how to create something that looks official, professional, & memorable.

But even while I was producing, I could feel it… Seattle was too slow for me.

Not “slow” in a negative way. It’s a beautiful city. Calm. Fresh air. Less chaos. It’s got a certain peace to it. But I’m built differently. My soul doesn’t run on calm. My fuel is movement. Noise. Pressure. The electric unpredictability of New York City. I didn’t last too long out there. After only a few quick months, I knew I would soon be returning back to NYC. Because deep down, I already understood something about myself: no matter where I travel, New York is home base. New York is my engine.

This month was also a time of solitude. A lot of time alone. A lot of thinking. A lot of long hours with nothing but my own thoughts, my own hunger, & my own drive. That kind of solitude can either break you or sharpen you. For me, it sharpened me. The isolation turned into focus. The quiet turned into output. When you’re alone & you’re really working, you start hearing your own creative instincts louder. You start discovering your voice.

And that’s what April 2016 was: solitude paired with explosive artistic growth.

It felt like everything inside me was expanding. Like my visual vocabulary was getting bigger. Like I was building skills that would later become essential to the whole PJ O’Rourke II world. It was a month where I could feel myself maturing as an artist, even if I didn’t fully recognize it at the time. I was learning how to create with intensity, even when the environment didn’t match my natural rhythm.

Looking back, April 2016 was one of those “quiet” months that wasn’t quiet at all. It was a pressure-cooker month. A training month. A month where the work got stronger, the mind got sharper, & the direction got clearer.

And the direction was obvious: back to New York.