When you live your life like this it hits you that you're really not living a life at all

My last day in the city wasn't particularly different from all the other days I had spent out there. Everything becomes so repetitive, bland, and so indistinguishable from the previous day. Time and any sense of progression loses its effect on you entirely. You don't feel like your moving forward in life towards any particular moment, certain date or anything really at all. Everything becomes so patterned from one day to the next. At times you get reminders, of how much time has passed. it comes in the form of the simple and mundane things that occur, in fleeting moments, such as thinking about the last time you took a shower, looking through a case of movies and seeing ones that you have already watched previously or it being hamburger-hot-dog night again with no buns or bread to eat it with.



And then the day finally comes and you find yourself leaving and moving on to something else, but you find its nothing new, its all the same. The only thing that really changed is the way in which you do it. Now I am taking a shower everyday and eating three meals but these days end up all become part of the previous pattern. I am eating with the same people and waking up next to the same people. Even when I am on the internet or phone I have the same people sitting next to me. None of it is any different then before. The sights, sounds and smells all remain the same. Its just now I am doing it in a different bed, on a different schedule, and at a different base.



I think of having been out here for six months and it shocks me, if people stopped counting the days, I would surely lose all track of them out here.



When you live your life like this it hits you that you're really not living a life at all. Where am I going....What am I doing...I ask myself this constantly....



On the last evening I was loaded into a truck with 15 other guys from the company. We had just been out that day at a checkpoint for five hours and immediately following our return, we went right back out again. It was quiet on the ride back. For the most part, you could see, the Marines sitting next to me felt relieved. They were getting all their contempt out for the Iraq people by throwing their arms out the truck and flipping people off, yelling "fuck you" indiscriminately to the people we passed by on the street below. I turned around and saw other Marines waving to little kids out the other side, some were taking pictures. I over heard one Marine talking to another about how sorry he felt for him because he didn't get any combat experience during his deployment. He wished him luck in finding it in his next one. I hope he finds what he's searching for.

Help for the art show...

If this is your first time visiting this blog and you are interested in helping, we need help with money to pay for printing and framing for an upcoming art show that Jayson's images will be entered into. If there is left over money, this money will be saved for producing the final product, the book. For more info of where to send money, please contact:



Jessica Lee

I will be happy to answer any questions you may have:)

Great Quote...

Reality lives in the imagination...

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Leaving Iraq!

There is a date set, that Jayson will be coming back home. For now, the date is the 10th of May. He will be returning home to, North Carolina, and then coming to San Diego, where he will spend time with family and friends. He will then be enrolling in school in Los Angeles,to seek out his dreams! It's been long awaited Jay!

My thoughts about photography

Photography means a great deal to me in terms of what I am able to share and reveal to others, but its more than just this alone. If it was only this then you could presumably say that the whole process of taking pictures and putting them on this blog is just a means to an end in that I am here just to show you what is happening in Ramadi. But for me photography is something far greater than just a tool or method to capture our existence like whats going on in Iraq. It has become something that continually changes and alters me personally as a human being and not only in terms of the way I think and feel about life but also in the way I experience it. When I am out there on the streets patrolling looking threw my camera eye-ing a shot to take, something begins to change inside of me. A sense of calm and peace slow invades my mind, I become relaxed and still. I notice and focus in on the subtle movements and expressions of the marines, people and children around me. My senses increase to an ever higher state of perception. I pick up on sounds that I never would of heard, movements that I would never have otherwise seen. I enter into a place where the minute and finite distinctions of color, shape, light, texture, movement and emotion can be observed and experienced in their true essence. I get lost in this place where time slows down and the senses become overwhelmed, here I simultaneously lose my self and find myself connected to all things. Here I find my true state of being. Every-time I go out and use my camera I am volunteering myself to experience and feel to all that is around me, here I find my own true essence for life.

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