I've cancelled this project about a dozen times. For all of the reasons you'd think, no money, no resources, no time, the pictures are too old, too damaged, too low of quality, or just plain shitty. Excuses, everyone of them. Ultimately it came down to fear. Fear that I'm really not as good an artist as I would like to think I am. The fear that you wouldn't like any of these images or worse, that you would. It was the words of a fourteen year old girl, a character on a show I was watching with my daughter, that convinced me to finally finish this book.

"I made a promise to myself when I was 6, and you don't break a promise to a 6 year old."

- Deborah Carnegie Cameron Delong

Maybe I wasn't six years old when I promised myself I would make this book but that's not the point, is it?

There are a few things I'd like you to keep in mind while you peruse these images. First, I was a teenager when most of these were started and second, I was homeless for most of those years. Many of these images were drawn on whatever scraps of paper happened to be lying around. Some are stained with coffee, some have cigarette or roach burns on them; one even has blood on it, though I don't remember how that happened! Some of the pieces are a little dark, some are a little disturbing (even to me) but I guess that's the point of art, isn't it? To trigger those emotions that we are often too afraid to initialize ourselves. To force us to look into the dusty, forgotten corners of our hearts and minds, to see what we've left behind. So, here is my adolescence laid out in 81,000 unspoken words. I leave it to you to interpret them as you see fit.

-Jason