Wake Self Day 2025

November 5th, 2019. Morning 

Mornings have always been sacred to me. Quiet, pure. I usually avoid my phone, but that day I opened Facebook and immediately started seeing post after post saying goodbye to Andy Martinez. Wake Self. At first it was just utter confusion, absolute disbelief. Then  a wave of sadness and despair came crashing down, completely wrecking me. I was living with Stephanie in a little duplex across the street from Roosevelt Park. I couldn’t breathe and started crying uncontrollably. She asked if I was okay. 

 “Wake Self died” I said.

 I saw him a few days ago on Friday at Secret Gallery’s Day of the Dead show downtown. I don’t remember if I dapped him up or not, I was still kind of salty that he owed me some money from a sticker order. I don’t know if I was actually that petty or if grief is just rewriting things, but either way I didn’t know it’d be the last time I ever saw him alive. 

On Sunday I got a call from an unrecognized number. It was him. His album release party was going down that week and he wanted me to help him print some T-shirts and maybe some more stickers. He apologized for the last late payment and said he got me this time. It was super last minute, and we hadn’t worked together in a while, but when Wake Self asks a favor from me I don’t say no. We made plans to meet up on the 5th, he was gonna come by my place and drop off the shirts, I was looking forward to reconnecting and maybe planning some video work for the future.

 Instead he was killed by a drunk driver later that night. 

He succumbed to his injuries on the 5th, the day he was supposed to be at my door.

So many emotions, so much collective grieving online. I looked through my archives for a photo and chose one from our trip to Costa Rica. Him standing on the rocks, facing the ocean, hands raised like he was summoning the waves. I’d told him to pose like the wizard in Fantasia . “Absolutely devastated” were my only words.

My mom called asking what was happening. I told her.

“Oh Joel, I’m sorry… how?”

I answered, but when she started asking more questions, I snapped. Told her I didn’t want to talk and hung up.

I needed to get away from my phone. Why did I choose to look at it today?  The house, the city, everything was suffocating me. “I want to go to the mountains.” I told Steph. So we packed up, leaving my phone at home, and went into the mountains. The stoic unshakable mountains that could take the weight of the day and give me space to breathe.

 These last few years I’ve  turned my health around. Went to therapy, trying to be a better person after becoming a father. 

 It started with running, I ran on a treadmill, then I ran outside, then I ran marathons, now I’m running over mountains. My time in the mountains and trails has become tightly knit into my spirituality, my form of art and self expression. 

When I first met Wake Self, I liked gangsta rap, aggressive stuff that really gets your blood going. But I respected his hustle so much. Just had his shit together. It would get weird sometimes how spiritual he’d be or some of the “Self Help” talks he’d give to the camera. But it was genuine, he really would talk about wanting to create art that inspired people to live better and treat themselves and the world better.

 At the time I’m writing this, it’s been 6 years since he was taken from us, and one month since I dropped my phone in a crack in the mountain. The day before November’s full moon I got a text from Wake’s brother Eric that they’d be entering Andy’s urn into his gravesite the next day if I wanted to attend a small gathering of friends and family. I’d be there. 

I have been doing a lot of reflecting recently. Personal life problems, lost my phone, got it replaced and my problems only multiplied. Everything is so immediate now. Just constant input all the time. The ability for the entire world to grab at your attention every second of the day.

Having a kid and running a business keeps the phone glued to me. Using it as my main camera has tethered it to me even more. I’d planned my “big return” to social media during the October new moon, but the pressure was building and I finally saw the lesson I was supposed to learn: slow down and live my fucking life, instead of trying to document it for validation. What am I building toward? Am I living, or just playing a character who needs constant proof that he’s alive?

All that reflection kept circling back to the same thing: what actually matters, what I’m doing with my time, and what I’m avoiding. About a year ago Wake’s mom Barbara, (which is also my mom’s name) asked me if I’d make a documentary on Andy. I haven’t done much actual videomaking in years, even though that was my original form of expression that I latched onto, even before photography, second only to my writing. I’ve been thinking about the Wake Self documentary for months now, part of why I wanted to get a new phone to start making videos again and get into the groove.

So when November 5th came around this year, I woke up before dawn with purpose. I got my shit together, drank some espresso, and stepped outside to see the glorious full moon hanging in the eastern sky. The closest, largest, and brightest full moon of 2025. The Beaver Moon. Late fall. The time when beavers lock in and build before winter hits.

 Simo and I head back to the U-mound trailhead at the end of copper ave. These last few weeks I’ve been exploring the named trails in the sandias, but I’m pressed for time today so I want to just go straight up as quickly as possible. My body felt good, strong. I started running and discovered a clean line up the mountain. I stop at the first hill to take some photos.

I have a totally different presence of mind in the mountains now after losing my phone last month. Won’t catch me slippin’ like that again. I try to give the offering asap, usually water, take a moment to show respect, connect as a force of nature instead of a visiting tourist or conquering outsider. 

I climb higher, and eventually stumble on the “Eye of the Sandias”, an eye painted onto a huge granite boulder by an unknown artist sometime in the 60s or 70s. From the eye fall two deep blue teardrops. It’s been repainted over the years with artists adding touches of their own style here and there but anyone that’s lived here can recognize the sadness, and loss that can come from watching Albuquerque from above. The permanence of stone and the fragility of life as a human.

We made it back down the mountain after five miles and fifteen hundred feet of gain. I drove home, showered,  then put on The Alpinist, a documentary about Marc-André Leclerc, and got pulled right in.

This dude didn’t give a shit about anything but climbing.  The movement, the solitude, the purity of it. At one point he even ghosted the filmmakers for months while he disappeared into the mountains. 

Halfway through I realized why I had never heard of him. A quick search confirmed it. He died about seven years ago in a climbing accident. The exhaustion from the run and the emotion of it all hit me hard. I fell asleep with mortality heavy on my mind.

I woke up to knocking on the door and barking.

I figured it was a delivery or something but they kept knocking, and knocking, you could tell it was getting more aggressive, so eventually I went to open it and it’s my friend that is absolutely livid saying they’ve been trying to get a hold of me about a project. The full moon energy has hit this guy hard, making a huge scene. I'm sure a lot of people would call the cops or scream back at this guy but I’ve already found my peace today. After berating me about “communication” “you always do this” etc I finished up the work and got ready to lay to rest Andy’s ashes.

I’d rather not talk about the actual ceremony. 

Later that night I went back out to watch the moonrise, make photos, and reflect.

So much has changed since the day Wake was taken. But here I was, older, different, awake in ways I wasn’t back then. My body, my mind, my spirit, all reshaped by movement, fatherhood, loss, and the mountains that refuse to bend. Sitting there under that huge November moon, I understood why everything had been circling back. My relationship with technology hindering me instead of using it to tell stories like Wake's. Some of those first videos we made were always lean, improvised, and followed the moment, and that’s probably the only honest way I can tell his story now if the task does fall on my shoulders. I'm ready.