Aside from being one of the O.G. contributors to TheLegendsLeague from the start and one of my favourite designers, Tim Okura has a pretty crazy eye for photos that are dope just for the old school sake of being dope. Not making them victims of an abusive Photoshopaholic father, he’s decided to take 1 photo a day for the entire year on his point and shoot Pentax Optio camera and lay them into a vintage style photo frame for the sharing.
I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to have them at my finger tips to share with you.
Enjoy. Daily.
And feel free to let us know what you think, feel, taste, and smell when you see them.
For those of you who missed out on what TheLegendsLeague MySpace used to be like, check this one update I found tonight on my computer talking about my 3rd suicide attempt and my daughter.
“I’m living a movie, not living by rules”
SAREN-SOL ESPIRITU GALLARDO
2 weeks after turning 17, the schizophrenic bouts and struggle with prescription drugs and alcoholism reached an unbearable low. Frequent visits with self proclaimed visionaries and seers furthered the confusion and disgust with self and situation. I was meeting grown men who had been informed of their own deaths and the want for authorities to have their heads; being offered cake by their house maids prior to reviewing documents of plots to overthrow the western world with religion and global peace. They told me the name of the supposed third anti-Christ and were sure that it was neccessary for me to spread the word to my loved ones so that they too could be saved. I was hiding in bathrooms reading prayers they told me to read; calling long lost lovers and pleading with them to do the same as I recited these soul saving pieces over payphone scratches and wind howling outside of grease bucket restaurants with tears on my cheeks and a doorag on. The world was shrinking well smaller than it already was.
With everything toppling into itself, I was seeing the most terrifying things in my life. Missing work from screaming out that my hands were covered in blood and I had seen the faces of the devil in pairs, known the strength of the hands of the abusive and the sound of the voice of hate and evil. It called me from the yard and offered a box through a cloaked woman in black. My heart shook with every beat, and I wrote through it all for a friend I thought I would never meet. And then on the 17th of May, 1998, I swallowed a bottle of ExtraStrength Tylenol by candle light, while reading these pages and reliving the passed 17 years. I swallowed it with a 40 of Colt, back when it still read, “Works Every Time” on the inside. I hoped so hard that it would work considering the last time I had done this, I ended up drinking that tar shit in front of my mother who had no idea how large a role she would later play in my 4th attempt as well as my most intense breakdown after 4 months spent on house arrest.
Things happen in fucked up ways, they do.
I would wake up to a hand rubbing my thigh. Well “waking” in this case refers to physically opening my eyes. Throughout the whole thing, I was very much concious. Through them yelling that I was probably armed, through them carrying me out on a stretcher and shoving tubes into me at both ends. I was concious through them saying I wasn’t breathing and was really laughing inside of my head for so much of the time. I don’t know if it was the hospital room lamp or the light at the end of the tunnel, but I can tell you this, it was peace like I’ve never had. The hand rubbing my leg was that of a woman I had met during my second attempt. I don’t know how she knew I was there, or even how she remembered me, considering it had occured 3 years prior. I only remember her saying this as she put her hand onto my forehead and rubbed it gently, “You said I would never see you again”.
Soon after she left, I began to regain my wits. I was able to speak a little bit more, and realized I had been given a catheter. I yelled at the nurse to get it out of me and she responded by wheeling me over to a spot that was a little darker and had a curtain to go around it. Before long I was in a room with none of my actual clothes still in sight and a doctor offering me a pill as big as the top part of my pinky finger. It was supposed to make me feel better.
That evening I realized I would be in the hospital for longer than an evening. I realized that they had put me with the less than sane and the supposed schizos. They didn’t give me my shoes. They wouldn’t let me wear my clothes. I was the youngest of us all, and the only one in hospital gowns. I saw a few visitors, and received, “No Kryptonite” from Ryan Donovan within a week. He told me that they needed their man of steel.
I would later write a piece entitled, “Second March” that would be an expression of the “Now what”. And the following year, on March the 2nd, my daughter was born.
I need you all to know this - I share everything with you because we are a unit. Humans as a team of individuals who power a single. That single is the good of us all. When are we going to make things grand? My suggestion is immediately. Without inspiration we are nothing, without influence we have done too little. Share yourselves, it may spare the lives of another.
Much, much love to you all. Welcome To The Legend’s League
A few of ya’ll have asked about what has happened to TheLegendsLeague compilations that used to be available for free download off of the MySpace page. The music, which was in large part compiled from the updates that were done about 3 times a month, was also the backdrop for many of my long hours spent working, writing, designing and planning next steps for TheLegendsLeague in 2007. One of the compilations is actually a CD that my homey Gavin and I used to listen to while working overnight at ICVisions in Toronto in and around 2003/04. I’d have a bottle of Bacardi in my bag, a candle lit somewhere in the room, and 2 PC monitors blaring Photoshop and Illustrator screens at me, waiting for me to learn the tricks of the trade until the sun came up or I passed out on the futon in the studio.
I’ve made the compilations available once again for those of you who didn’t get a chance to download them all, for those of you who didn’t even know they existed, and for the rest of you who have just been all out supportive of everything that we do over here on our end.
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