Echoes of the Garage

Fragments of life in Los Angeles — art, film, street stories, and the quiet rebuilding of a man. Start here: Best OfAboutSubscribe.


“Jazzy”

📓 Friday December 5, 2025 — 10:55 a.m.

Today has been like every morning:

Wake up — shit, I’m still alive.

This could mean damn, why?

Or it could mean I guess I have to keep walking toward the direction my inner compass says.

Make some coffee — grind my beans. Today it’s my Blue Bottle coffee beans.

It matters to smell the aroma of freshly ground beans.

I hear the beans getting ripped apart while I splash my face with cold-ass water.

It’s icy, chilled with a bit of mint, as the water slides across my brow, my cheeks, and the rest of the geometry that is this Mexican-American face.

Simba, orange fur ball, meows away — it’s time to walk him with his green constellation harness.

Walking into the cement yard, past the boxing heavy bag resting under a blue Disney Tinker Bell blanket, near the fence and the old white van used as extra storage, and the old 1967 junkyard Mustang — the hard-top one.

It is boring.

It is not sexy.

But it’s my morning.

While eating my chicken soup, with guacamole on the side, a bit of beans, and hot coffee mixed with canela —

my mother speaks.

“Hey, there’s some tostada chips. Do you want some?”

“No. I have a disdain for this. It makes my blood boil.”

It isn’t the chips.

So I explain:

“I’m older, living in a garage. I’ve always self-imploded. I’ve always had a shitty body that never helped me because I never helped it.

It’s a concept — not a chip, not ‘bad eating’ anymore.

I don’t want to go back to that guy.

I haven’t achieved what I wanted in life… and if I go back, I know I never will.”

Then something landed:

I am exactly who I give myself permission to be.

A broken man, from a broken family, with a broken mind —

but…

and I’ve always hated that word —

but today I choose a new life instead of the old one.

And I’m starting to like who I’m becoming.

To become, to me, means this:

do what you’ve never done before, to become who you want to be.



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