About
My damaged Brain
THE LIVING ARCHIVE — THE LIFE BEHIND POETIC CINEMA
Introduction
This page introduces a large personal archive that exists across photographs, videos, written reflections, and social media documentation created during one of the most turbulent and transformative periods of the creator’s life.
What visitors will encounter here is not a typical photo collection, and it is not ordinary social media activity. Instead, it is a personal record of a human being attempting to understand his life, his past, his addictions, and the forces that shaped his experiences.
The majority of this documentation began during the years surrounding and following the COVID era. During that time, the creator experienced deep personal loss, emotional collapse, addiction struggles, and profound psychological conflict. Relationships changed, family challenges emerged, and the stability that once existed in earlier chapters of life disappeared.
In the middle of this turmoil, a simple device — a phone — became a tool for survival.
Photography, video recordings, written thoughts, and public posts became a way to document emotions, memories, and realizations while navigating a long process of recovery and understanding.
This archive is the result of that process.
What Visitors Are About to See
Visitors exploring this material should understand that this archive is not organized as a perfect timeline and it was never created as a formal project at the beginning.
Instead, it developed organically.
Images were captured because something in the moment felt important, painful, meaningful, or worth remembering. Sometimes the photographs reflect a memory of childhood. Sometimes they capture reflections on the creator’s earlier life in Washington Heights, where he navigated complex environments involving street culture, community relationships, and business partnerships between Black and Dominican communities.
Other images reflect moments of recovery, spiritual searching, church involvement, emotional confusion, or philosophical insight.
Some photographs may appear simple or ordinary at first glance. Others contain symbolism or emotional meaning that may not be immediately obvious.
Together they form a collection of fragments — fragments of memory, fragments of realization, fragments of a mind processing its own life.
The archive does not follow a straight line.
Recovery itself does not follow a straight line.
Memories of childhood, reflections on past businesses, thoughts about addiction, moments of clarity, and reflections on societal contradictions often appear side by side because that is how the mind works when it is trying to rebuild itself.
The Role of Photography and Documentation
The act of photographing and documenting became part of the creator’s recovery process.
Instead of remaining trapped in cycles of addiction and destructive habits, the phone became a way to redirect attention toward observation, reflection, and expression.
Objects, environments, memories, and moments were captured not simply to record events but to slow down the mind and examine life more closely.
Over time, this practice helped the creator begin to understand patterns in his life — patterns related to addiction, reward systems in the brain, emotional reactions, and the influence of environment and social systems.
Some images represent painful realizations. Others represent beauty discovered in unexpected places. Some represent memories of what once existed — family moments, businesses that were built, communities that shaped identity.
All of them contribute to the process of understanding a life that has moved through many different chapters.
Why Instagram Became the Platform
Much of this documentation was shared through Instagram.
For most people, Instagram is used to display curated highlights of life — celebrations, achievements, or moments meant to appear perfect.
In this case, the platform became something very different.
It became a public journal of thoughts, observations, emotions, and visual documentation.
Images were often paired with music, captions, or reflections intended to capture the emotional tone of the moment. Some posts contain subtle messages or social commentary. Others are simple expressions of what the creator was feeling or noticing at a particular point in time.
The Instagram archive therefore functions as a digital record of a recovery process that unfolded publicly.
Visitors exploring that archive should not approach it as a traditional social media feed. Instead, it should be viewed as a collection of moments captured during a long effort to rebuild a life and understand the deeper forces that shaped it.
What This Archive Represents
This archive represents several things at once.
It represents a life shaped by complex environments, including the cultural and economic realities of Washington Heights.
It represents a person who experienced success, entrepreneurship, and community influence before losing much of that stability during the disruptions of the COVID era.
It represents the psychological effects of addiction, loss, and emotional collapse.
It represents the difficult and often painful process of recovery and self-examination.
And it represents the birth of a creative framework that eventually became known as Poetic Cinema.
The ideas behind Poetic Cinema did not appear suddenly. They emerged gradually from the process of documenting life, reflecting on experiences, and searching for meaning within both suffering and survival.
In this sense, the archive is not separate from the art.
It is the ground from which the art grew.
Why This Archive Has Value
The value of this archive lies in its honesty and its immediacy.
Many stories about recovery, addiction, and personal transformation are written years later after events have passed. Memories become polished, simplified, or reshaped over time.
This archive is different.
Much of it was created while the experiences were still unfolding.
That gives it a rawness and authenticity that can be meaningful for readers, artists, researchers, and anyone interested in understanding how a human being processes life, memory, and emotional struggle.
For some viewers, this material may simply be a personal story.
For others, it may become a lens through which to explore larger questions about addiction, resilience, creativity, faith, and the complicated ways that environment and history shape individual lives.
How Visitors Should Explore the Archive
Visitors are encouraged to approach this archive with patience.
The material is extensive and it reflects many different emotional states and phases of reflection. It may not always make immediate sense.
But taken together, the images, videos, captions, and reflections form a portrait of a life navigating collapse, recovery, and creative awakening.
Each image is a piece of that larger story.
Each reflection represents a moment when the creator attempted to understand something about himself, about society, or about the forces that influence human behavior.
An Invitation
This archive is shared with the hope that others may find meaning within it — whether as inspiration, reflection, or simply as an honest account of one person’s journey through difficulty and discovery.
The process of documenting these moments eventually contributed to the creation of Poetic Cinema, a body of work that transforms life experiences into artistic storytelling.
Visitors are invited to explore the archive not simply as observers, but as witnesses to a human life attempting to understand itself.
Enter the Archive
Explore the ongoing visual record of this journey through the Instagram archive below.
Before entering the archive, please take a moment to understand what you are about to see.
The images, videos, and reflections inside this archive were created during years of struggle, recovery, and reflection.
What may appear to some as a collection of photographs is, for me, a record of a mind trying to understand itself after loss, addiction, and the collapse of a life I once knew.
My phone became the tool I used to document that journey — moments of pain, memory, insight, faith, and rebuilding.
I will never again be the person I once was, but I will always remember who that person was.
This archive is my attempt to share those experiences honestly with the world so that others may understand the forces that shape a life and a mind.
If you choose to explore this material, please do so with patience, understanding, and respect.
ENTER THE ARCHIVE
If a Critic Were to Speak About This Work
If this page were encountered as part of a contemporary exhibition, the viewer might first notice something unusual.
The exhibition begins not with a portrait of a person, but with a portrait of a brain.
The brain appears almost scientifically—split into hemispheres, suggesting a struggle between emotional survival and logical reasoning. At first glance, the presentation feels analytical, almost academic. The viewer expects a lecture about psychology.
But the structure of the work slowly reveals something else.
Behind the explanation lies a doorway.
When the visitor steps through that doorway, the ordered language of theory gives way to a living archive—photographs, fragments of thought, philosophical reflections, cultural commentary, humor, anger, confusion, and moments of unexpected beauty.
What seemed like a scientific explanation of the brain becomes a confrontation with the reality of how a brain actually lives.
The viewer begins to understand that the brain shown at the entrance is not a medical diagram. It is a metaphor for the battlefield in which a life unfolded.
The archive that follows is not curated in a conventional way. It moves through memory the way the brain itself moves—jumping between past and present, between pain and realization, between chaos and clarity.
This work might therefore be understood as a form of autobiographical conceptual art.
It is not simply a story about a person’s life.
It is an attempt to show what happens to a brain shaped by environment, addiction, survival, loss, recovery, and reflection.
The artist does not present a polished narrative. Instead, he exposes the fragments that remain after decades of experience—fragments that include the streets of Washington Heights, cultural memory, chemical warfare through drugs and substances, the collapse that followed the COVID era, and the long attempt to rebuild meaning from those events.
Technology itself becomes part of the artwork. The phone that recorded the archive becomes the instrument through which the brain documents its own reconstruction. Social media—normally used to display perfection—becomes a public journal of survival.
What emerges is not a conventional exhibition.
It is closer to a neurological landscape.
The visitor moves from theory into lived evidence, from the image of a brain into the unpredictable activity of a human mind shaped by its environment.
The work invites viewers to ask uncomfortable questions.
How much of a human life is the result of choice?
How much is the result of chemicals, environments, systems, and pressures acting upon the brain?
And when a life is documented honestly, what does that record reveal about the invisible battles that most people never see?
The artist behind this work is still alive to explain it.
That fact gives the piece a rare immediacy. Instead of critics reconstructing meaning years later, the voice of the creator remains present, guiding viewers through the fragments of a brain that endured, adapted, and ultimately turned its experiences into art.
This page, the books, the stories, and the archive together form what the artist calls Poetic Cinema—a body of work where autobiography, philosophy, street culture, recovery, and reflection intersect.
To enter the archive is to enter that landscape.
The viewer is not asked to agree with the artist’s conclusions.
They are simply asked to witness the evidence of a mind that lived through its own storm and chose to document it.
The door is open.
Enter the Archive.
Backyard Testimony — 2021–2022
These pictures were taken in 2021 and 2022.
That was the time when my whole life felt like it was crashing down on me. I knew something was wrong, and it felt like it was only a matter of time before everything collapsed.
I would go into the backyard of my house often. Sometimes I was cleaning, sometimes just trying to stay busy, preparing for something I couldn’t even name. But almost every time I ended up back there, I’d find myself slouched over somewhere, staring into space, worrying about what was going to happen to my life.
The strain on my brain was intense. Memories kept replaying—everything I had survived, everything I had fought through. Washington Heights. Bergen County. Miami. All the nights of uncertainty, all the hustling, all the decisions made just to stay alive.
By that time, I felt too old, too worn out, and too heartbroken to try again.
One day I opened my refrigerator and realized I didn’t have much food left. I grabbed a can of ravioli and heated it up. I remember being really hungry. Maybe hungover. Just exhausted from life.
I took a picture while I was about to bite into it.
Looking back now, I know something was wrong with me mentally. It’s a raw picture — me leaning forward, mouth open, about to bite the food like an animal that hadn’t eaten. At the time I didn’t understand what processed food does to the brain or blood sugar, or how stress and survival can push a person into strange states of mind.
But I remember the hunger clearly.
Another picture was taken while I was wearing my black robe — the same robe that had been with me for five or six years. I was in the backyard smelling the flowers. I had never really taken the time to smell the roses that grew back there before. But that day I did.
And when I realized I was doing something so simple, I said to myself, let me take a picture of this.
When I look at that photo now, I look like a crazy mafia boss who lost his mind. But at that moment I knew the picture would matter one day, because I didn’t feel normal at all.
I felt like I was dying.
Part of me wanted my kids to remember me somehow — not even knowing if they would care or not — but just leaving something behind that showed who I was in those final moments of confusion and exhaustion.
There were other pictures too. One with my Yankee hat on. In that one I remember thinking:
What else am I supposed to do after fighting all these years just to survive?
After COVID everything had changed. The streets were different. People were struggling. Money was running out. I had lost my relationship. I had lost my mother. And I felt like my body and mind were giving up.
I thought I was dying.
But I couldn’t let my kids see me die.
So I would go to the backyard alone. Sometimes with a beer. Sometimes with a little wine. Just sitting there trying to figure out what to do next… trying to solve a life that suddenly didn’t make sense anymore.
Those pictures weren’t meant to be art.
They were evidence.
Evidence of a man who had survived a war for decades and finally sat down in the quiet of his own backyard… trying to understand if he had anything left inside him.
This page was not created by following a system.
It was created by a life that moved outside the systems that were meant to shape it.
Everything you see here—the brain, the explanations, the colors, the stories, the books, the photographs, the Instagram archive—is part of one continuous expression. It is the result of a human brain trying to understand itself after decades of survival, addiction, loss, betrayal, and the pressures of environments that many people never see.
My art does not come from perfection or from professional rules.
It comes from a free spirit that was shaped, damaged, and strengthened by real experiences.
For many years my brain lived in a kind of chemical warfare—sugar, alcohol, cocaine, heroin, and the constant forces that existed in the communities around me. These things shape the brain. They shape the body. They shape the way a person sees the world. Most people only see the body and judge what it does. But the real battle happens in the brain.
This project—Poetic Cinema—is my attempt to show that battle.
The books, the stories, the images, and the archive are not separate pieces. They are fragments of the same mind. A mind that survived what it lived through and chose to document it so the future could understand how environment, memory, addiction, and recovery reshape a human being.
When you press the button below, you are not simply entering a social media page.
You are entering the raw archive of that life.
Inside you will see moments that may feel confusing, philosophical, emotional, humorous, painful, or strange. That is intentional. A human brain does not organize its memories perfectly. It moves through fragments—memories, reactions, reflections, discoveries.
That is what this archive represents: fragments of a brain trying to rebuild itself and make sense of the world.
I am still alive to explain this work. The words you read here come directly from the mind that created it. They are not interpretations written years later by critics or historians.
This is my life speaking for itself.
If you choose to continue, please enter with curiosity, patience, and respect.
Enter the Archive
From the Artist
I wasn’t raised in universities.
I was raised in a concrete jungle.
Washington Heights in the 1980s and 1990s was a classroom of survival, risk, loyalty, and consequence. Many people lived through that era, but few had the chance to sit down years later and translate those memories into words, images, and music.
Technology gave me the tools to do what once seemed impossible — to turn lived experience into a living archive.
What you see here is not just lyrics or drawings. It is a mind reflecting on fifty years of life, survival, mistakes, friendships, losses, and lessons.
If something in these pages makes your brain shake a little — if you find yourself surprised that a story like this exists — then the work has done what it was meant to do.
Poetic Cinema is simply one person’s way of turning memory into testimony, and testimony into art.