Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food, page 4

Reflections on the eyes of the monkey and the ears of the hyper-bat on my 53rd birthday

I’m 53 today. I don’t feel old. And I don’t know why in all honesty. When I look back, it seems like I’ve been alive for a long, long ass time. I’ve seen some super gnarly shit. Long ago I learned the road through hard times is the hard road, and that might be why I keep entering wide pastures of life. I’m in one right now. Quarantine or no, the last few years have been increasingly better, and I’ve had a great deal of fun in life already. These are interesting times. 35 years or so ago, me and many of my chums set out down a mysterious highway with no rest stops and no speed limit, and while many of them died, the survivors became curiously good at being alive. Obvious. But interesting. After 50 is when we get to enjoy this.

Once, I looked into the eyes of a small monkey at the zoo. It’s hard to describe the haunting things I saw there, but I’ll try now to illustrate a point. His eyes were a shade of brown you don’t see in human eyes, a golden root beer, and there was somebody home in there. Placid, but just below the surface I could see the fat serpent swallowing the moon. I imagined I could see some hint of his behavioral coding, that he was connected to his history at every moment, that this monkey was in fact the tip of a temporal mountain that spread backward through time until at its ancestral base there was all of proto-monkeydom. Later, when I envisioned that money’s eyes in my mind, I saw other things. It was all my imagination, not in this monkey. What I saw, in truth, was facets of myself. That thought completed a metaphor that took two decades to construct. As I changed, I saw different things. I will interpret things differently in the future if I continue changing, as I will. I should be careful to study the right things, because everything I internalize will be part of that change. I should also be careful not to ignore certain things, the other side of the same coin. In any case, I can still close my eyes and see the monkey’s eyes.

I think about bats now more than I should, but it passes the time. Imagine- a bat enters a cave. CLICK. He hears in the echo the contour of the walls. Imagine if the bat could hear twice as well. Then escalate from there. The grains of sand become evident. Then the topography of spores. Further. The molecules in a falling drop of water. Now imagine the hyper-bat left the cave and faced outward. CLICK. Escalate. That bat would soon be able to read the writing on the surface of a piece of paper on the far side of the world. This is my favorite metaphor for thought. I trade ideas for currency, and the inside of my head is a loud place. I have to listen closely, and the older I get, the better my hearing becomes.

The eyes of the monkey. The ears of the hyper-bat. We should all have thoughts like these. What is a life well lived? I can sometimes hear echoes of the answer, see reflections of it. It has to do with highs and lows, twists and turns, miles beyond measure, movement. I’ve met many guys and after a moment had the curious understanding that I was in the company of a mama’s boy who would go from birth to death without significant pain or turbulence, without ecstasy, without moments of earnest confusion that give rise to at least a measure of what comes from trying to understand anything vast, and so pass from this earth like a cow’s grassy burp gusted into a gentle breeze. As luck would have it, I am not that guy. I take no credit for this. The cosmos and entropy picked my starting point in life, as it did yours. It is better to be one who thinks of monkeys and bats. I have paid for the privilege.

There were good players on the field in my 52nd year. My sweetheart fiance Sylvia is the most positive, bubbly, incredibly kind woman. She likes everyone, but she loves me with all of her great big heart. She tells me so all the time, and I believe her. My Kill Bill agent Stuart Miller, at the very end of the year, in a final feat of sorcery, introduced me to a producer I can’t help but greatly admire. Stu also sent me a miniature Cadillac for my birthday. Thanks bro. My good friends, most of whom forgot my birthday again, are a fine pack of rascals. I feel… Lucky.

Go check out http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com for details. Updated contact page.

The Time Traveler

My collection of antique cameras grew much larger over the holidays, but The Pho-Tak Time Traveler 120 has captured my fancy the most. It’s heavy, made of sorcery-grade cast iron, and the leather strap is still intact. I can’t wait to take it apart, repair its elbows and eyes, and put it back together in my little workshop because this camera, a supremely thoughtful gift from my gal Sylvia, will take pictures of bowls of noodles from different times.

I’m curious about the Pho of the 1960’s. What did the bowls look like? When did that fancy spoon enter the picture? The 70’s. Did the bowls have glitter? Did the pho smell a little like cocaine and hairspray? The pho of the 80’s, I already know, had generic Grateful Dead LSD in it, what a great era. I think it all went downhill after that. With my trusty Pho-Tak Time Traveler 120, I will soon find out.

The pho of 2030 will have tears and pig’s milk curd if we aren’t careful. The pho of 2050? Served on Mars in squeeze bulbs made of bamboo fiber and recycled parachute nylon. You’d be excited to have one too, admit it.

I’m curious if it might take pictures of other things. Hopeful, even. I might be able to walk out into the backyard and snap a few pics of the house in 100 years. I could go down the street and take a photo of the neighborhood 500 years ago, night after night, until I got pictures of people. Or! I could take pictures of the sky 5000 years in the future, and see… My spaceship.

Thank You Mr. Andrew Vacchs

So many great books. The Burke Series. Such a powerful advocate. This was a potent human being first and an incredible writer second. But his articles made a difference to me. Yesterday I came across this passage written by him on childhood emotional abuse-

Emotional abuse is often as painful as physical assault. And, with rare exceptions, the pain of emotional abuse lasts much longer. A parent’s love is so important to a child that withholding it can cause a failure-to-thrive condition, similar to that of children who have been denied adequate nutrition. Even the natural solace of siblings is denied to those victims who have been designated as the family’s “target child.” The other children are quick to imitate their parents. Instead of learning the qualities every child will need as an adult — empathy, nurturing and protectiveness — they learn the viciousness of a pecking order. And so the cycle continues.

I thought about this last night and told my gal about it when we went for a walk in the snow. It described perfectly a problem I’ve had with my family and put a new spin on a theory of mine, that somewhere in the past, a truly bad man ruined his son, and that son passed it on, and on that ruin went through time like a phantom train full of sorrow. I looked into it more, and eventually read more. And a strange peace came over me. In the night, I had nightmares about some of the worst people I’ve known and the terrible mistake I made by allowing them into my life. I woke up before dawn, disturbed, and then I looked at it all again.

Once again, I felt better. I worked on a short story for a little while, sitting at the kitchen table. It was so quiet in the house. Around seven am, I learned Andrew Vacchs had died in the night.

Rare. Strange. True. Memorable. Thank you for everything Mr. Vacchs. That whole sequence of events was so odd I had to write about it. Check out the works of this fantastic writer. Joe R. Lansdale, another great writer, said of him- “Andrew will never RIP.”

Emotionally abused children grow up with significantly altered perceptions, so that they perceive behaviors — their own and others’ — through a filter of distortion. Many emotionally abused children engage in a lifelong drive for the approval of others, which they translate as “love.” So eager are they for love — and so convinced that they don’t deserve it — that they are prime candidates for abuse within intimate relationships. And the almost-inevitable failure of adult relationships reinforces that sense of unworthiness, compounding the felony, reverberating throughout the victim’s life.

The key here, summarized, is self-respect. Get it, keep it. It was yours all along.

There Is No Spoon- The blurring of time in the holiday spotlight

It’s the holidays, a natural time to think about life, one’s hopefully unusual place in it, how to avoid certain things and places and people, how to make sure to embrace others. I’m generally an outsider during this time of year and it suits me at this point, but I have to confess, I enjoy watching other people interact with their families. Here in the time of Covid, all the little differences seem bigger than usual. The commonalities and ties seem more vibrant, too. This is when you realize, if you remain objective, that a person is generally smeared through time. The present is a blurry point in the center of a cloud that is also comprised of the past and elements of the future. Think about it. Earlier today, you flashed back to the past several times. It’s the holidays. You were probably also thinking about the coming new year. Your very own ghosts of Christmas past and future were all around you. The exact moment you were in? Really dialing in on now? Only if you were cooking, driving, getting down, reading- doing something that required your immediate concentration.

This unfocused notion of time, it seems, it just a festive version of what happens all year long, and it has me thinking about mindfulness and what I get out of my garbled version of it. I’ve often felt like I was smeared through too much time. In a given day I had long episodes of reminiscing, back to things I’ve seen, places I’ve been, people I’ve known, many of them generally pleasant though not always, but all in association with whatever is in front of me, what I was doing or seeing or feeling right then. Linking now with the past until the two overlap in a comfortable or a questionably instructive way. Like everyone else, at three am these same reflections go dark, and I think about the villains I failed to identify until it was years too late, an old friend who died before I could say goodbye, the kid I was rude to in second grade, the jackass in the store I should have punched in the neck for doing something awful in front of me. The blurry margins of now also extend into the future- a deadline I felt confident about in the day seems unachievable in the dark hours, etc. We all do this. It occurs to me that in this way, a bad childhood can cling to you. An unsatisfactory marriage. Things that are over and done and unchangeable. The coming months of a crappy job or the current pandemic can bear down on you, even though that story is unwritten and the details subject to entropy. Dragging past and future non-now business into NOW makes little sense, and the less I do it the better I feel. Now, as in the present, outside of the individual (as in me and you) is an almost unreal time as it is. We’re in a pandemic that won’t end. We’re on the cusp on an actual space age with rockets galore. I just read that someone tried to entangle a tardigrade and a qubit. The future has intruded into now, largely because things are happening blindingly fast and getting even faster. Now is quite simply gnarly enough without all the clutter surrounding it. Give it a try, dear reader. For the next few hours, whenever the past or the future hits you, drag yourself back into the moment. Now is better than the low points in either temporal direction, not as good as the highlight reel, but most of the time it isn’t that bad at all. And it now sucks? Well, you know where to focus your energy.

New book and film news over at my website, http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com, as well as an updated contact page. Happy Holidays!

Anne Rice, American Storyteller

Adios, sweet lady. Your stories made it a long, long way. Books are like music in some respects. We’re supposed to like and dislike the same things as the rest of the people in our social identity morass. If I adhered to that, I’d be stuck with everything between Hunter Thompson and Jim Harrison, but as this missive will show, I am poor at adherence. I loved Anne Rice’s pervert vampires. In an indirect way, Interview With The Vampire landed me in kid prison for a short period of time, and there the story of Daniel grew legs, in my world and my life at least. Looking back, it was a truly comical time. I was 16 and living with a pack of college dropouts in the university ghetto around UNM. I should have gone to Boulder, Colorado, my backup plan as a young runaway, and I certainly would have been better off, but there I was in scenic Albuquerque. The slobs in that house had all read Interview as well, and one night, after a little too much LSD, one of these pussies called his mom. He’d fallen off of some kind of shed or house he was crawling on and hurt his face, and the blood, well, it made one of the other kids have a vampire moment. It happens. When I was later tracked down and arrested, this helpful mommy ratted me out about the night of hallucinogens. I’d crossed multiple state lines, I already had a tattoo, I fit a profile, I guess, so I wound up in what they called D Block, with the cool young vatos who were in for doing shit like shooting cops and blowing up gas stations. And I shit you not, one of the dropout guys I’d lived with months back left three books for me at the front desk. The guards let me have one- Interview With The Vampire. Full circle, and it was about to broaden.

I didn’t have an especially bad time in bad kid prison. The other inmates were great storytellers. Those kids had done some crazy shit to get there. But they all loved the story of how I got popped and squashed as the indirect result of a vampire book. I even told them what the book was about and recounted a kind of Mark Twain/Readers Digest version of it one night in the rec room. I wonder what happened to those guys from time to time. I wonder now if any of them looked at CNN yesterday and saw the small obituary for Anne Rice. I wonder if they thought back, all the way across the long, long years, to that time in the Albuquerque Juvenile Detention Center. I did. Interview With The Vampire is one of those books. A great story links people and bridges time, and this is one of them. This is just a single example of how a good book can enter the American psychosphere. It will remain forever unknown how the story of a vampire, the consummate outsider, looking for his humanity, changed any of us. But change it certainly did. Picture for a moment- a group of cholo boys and a teen punk, sitting around a rec room and dreaming of cigarettes and freedom and laughing women and fast cars racing through the night, and then… listening to the second-hand story of a vampire in New Orleans, tempted to be the monster, trying to be the man, and so becoming neither. What a spectacular world. Thank you, Mrs. Rice, for that piece of magic.

On Winter Writing and Painting

This is my favorite time of year to write and paint. In the early morning, around 4:30, the world is quiet and still. The minds around me are all turned off, and they can’t send or transmit anything that might contaminate me. I don’t especially like most people, no one does, we all have circles within circles, but in winter I find it’s hard to fake it when I interact with Claymation cave dirt golems and non-player avatars. Only athletes, dream hustlers, and the suitably troubled are awake at 4:30, and I can deal with them. Before dawn, it seems important to relearn everything immediately. It’s always so clear right when you wake up that if you think you know how to do something, all you really know is what you knew yesterday. This sounds like a bumper sticker or a hippy Confucian mushroom axiom, but it most certainly is not. Also, before the day catches fire, I can usually find out what I feel like communicating and then measure it in some way. Some of it is crap, a smaller amount is only marginal crap. Stringing words together without this process is just graphomania, a pointless puking of surface zeros. In art this is called kitsch, no matter the technique, no matter what fancy art school discharged you into the great public toilet. There’s seldom money in those hills, and it isn’t true work, as in adding to the real wealth of humanity- the body of well-crafted, meaningful things. Rising early is like cheating in this way.

Progress comes easier to me in the dark morning when it’s cold, and the most valuable, rare, fine new thoughts, the ones that seem like they belong to someone better than me, come in those hours. My mind sometimes has the lightning it had when I was a kid who couldn’t even read. I never actually had dyslexia. I was just bad, big difference, but I remember. I can recall not being able to draw, too. I’m not old and I’m certainly too shallow and fucked in the head for such pitiful nonsense, but I’m unyoung enough to tinker with this ‘headlight’ rather than follow the flashes wherever they might lead. Maybe that isn’t true, and the notion of headlight in the morning darkness in fact a hopeful but delusional artifact of a cognitive flaw. I’m just smart enough to suspect myself, so at the very least I’m unsure of everything, and there’s a certain nimbleness in that. Nimble goes a long way in this rocky place.

The cold in the house works for me too, and I wear my coat and sit at the table in the dining room. The house is always tidy because my thoughts are too unfocused and prone to obnoxiousness to live in an untidy house. The house is full of antiques because I borrow many of my thoughts from the forgotten dead, so I need their furniture. The holiday lights are up, but there’s no way I’ll ever turn them on. In that dark morning, they’ll remind me of happy things that make me sad to consider, and who needs the distraction of wholeness at this point. A single ongoing project is a testament to a lack of imagination, scope, girth of soul cock, and stamina. It also smacks of amateurish overconfidence. I have more than twenty paintings going at any point, and on my desktop right now- three novels, one screenplay, and one horror of a presentation that is, for now, outside of my technical expertise to complete. And I’m not even ambitious in this regard. The work starts wherever I land, on a page where the ancient reptile at the base of my brain guides me, and then I sink without friction into the fog line of someone and somewhere else. That feeling isn’t thrilling, it isn’t even satisfying. It’s a smooth, cool stone in my chest. I am a smooth, cool stone in my own chest when I’m at my most professional, and that, dear reader, is… absurd is a well-known mirror word, used primarily by the absurd themselves. I smile to think of this. None of this is absurd. It’s comical.

Behold The Future (Part 1)

You can too. But we’re talking about me right now. The Wright Brothers first flight was in 1903. Sixty-six years later, in 1969, a dude walked on the moon. It took less than a single human lifespan to go from a wonky little plane made from bicycle parts to the fucking moon. I was born on the second to last day of 1969. By the time I’m 66, people will probably be living on Mars. I’m a Red Mars ala Kim Stanley Robinson kinda guy. I hope he’s right.

In the next decade or so, a really smart computer will tell each of us why we are the way we are, and we’ll all be incredibly embarrassed. Some more than others. What this computer tells us will become our most closely guarded secret. We can all see that coming. Best of luck! LSD will become wildly popular around then as a fractured psyche reintegration mechanism.

Human organs for transplant will be grown in personal pigs. I’m calling mine Ted. Maybe Chad.

Humanity will learn how to communicate with dolphins and whales. I’m going to be pen pals with one. And I will lie boldly to my cetacean and lead him or her to believe I’m from House Stark, and shit is unwell in Westeros. The armies of the cunning scumbag Boba Fet are bad enough, but the Borg are far worse. Our fading hope is that Spiderman will take the Iron Throne, but he won’t put the bong down and we all know, deep down where hope dies, that he’s nothing but a big mouth fat ass bum.

A new form of entertainment will be born. I don’t know what it will be, but I can’t wait. It might be like ready Player One but I sure as fuck hope not. If conservatives rise it will reflect their awkward passions, so statistically we’re looking at mean holographic transvestites with mighty cocks, muscle trucks and stadium-sized McDonald’s theme parks with crappy nickel beer and two-dollar pink animal slime pumps. Remember to vote.

Covid, the next Covid, and then the next one will trash the real estate value in the largest cities. This is already happening, but I’m talking about a slide into a kind of rock bottom, shorn and gutted landscape that reflects the ethos of the people who live there. The super ghettos owned by the diminished elite will delight and embarrass the world. Disease, the great equalizer once again.

China will conquer Afghanistan through gentrification.

Fission will be achieved within a decade, but the technology will be absorbed by the current energy corporations and the great power advance of this age will remain expensive.

Hilarity After My Pfizer Booster

I must have gotten three duds in a row. I got my booster on Friday, and once again I have no desire to eat fast food pink animal slime. I still have no interest in Iron War Big Money Jesus. My cock works just fine. I have no fear of giant minority thugs sneaking through the bathroom window. Zero American Taliban vibes. No desire to watch FOX or even CNN. The microscopic government pyramids they put in the shit don’t work. I don’t feel obedient at all. At this juncture, I have to laughably point out that our most obedient citizens are the ones who object to vaccines. I doubt they’ll believe me. This is like a freakish logic loop in Star Trek at this point.

This may not be a good sign, but I do feel like eating one of those roast beef sandwiches from Laurelhurst Market. In fact, I will. Not to get up behind the podium, but maybe you should too.

We Are The Stranger

I get a kind of seasonal jet lag in late October and early November. Last night, as I ever so slowly drifted off, I thought back on all the people I’ve known. 99.9 % of them, maybe more, I’ll never see again. You’re in the same boat, dear reader. Think about it. For me? All the kids I went to school with? Lost to the winds of time. I know two at this point, one of them I know I’ll see again. They many people I’ve worked with? Dozens and dozens of them, some of them really great? They live all over the place. The unknown number of people I’ve tattooed over thirty-plus years on three continents? I liked so many of them, but they’re gone, off living their lives. I wouldn’t even recognize most of them anymore, they wouldn’t know me either. I know people right now that I won’t know in two years, and I’ve met people this year I won’t even remember at all soon enough. By the time you’re 50 (I’m 51) many of your relatives are dead. In this life, I won’t run into any of my few remaining relations again, simply nothing in common. Supposedly, we know 100 people. Social media artificially inflates this, but the real number is somewhere around 100. The size of the hunter-gatherer pod we were designed to be a part of. If that’s true, and deep down we all know it is, then only one of them really matters, and that person isn’t on the list. It’s The Stranger.

As late-night revelations go, that isn’t bad. I know a guy who’s brusque to the point of being rude to waiters and waitresses. The amount of jizz, spit, hair, ass juice, and crotch rub he’s eaten as a result is unthinkable. The Stranger can be a huge bummer if fucked with and will readily Fight Club your food. The Stranger can charge you more and deliver shitty service across the board, at the store, in a cab, for car repairs, essentially at all points of interaction. The Stranger is inescapably everywhere. At the same time, I know people who are so honest and true and good-hearted that The Stranger is able to sense this and often comes to their aid. Your relationship with The Stranger is what you make of it. We all get to decide. Fell right asleep after that. I’ve always gotten along well with strangers.

Morning thoughts about ghost books, dingbats, phantom Madonna songs and the Pinkus solution…

7:00 a.m. Some mornings, people wake up restfully blank, some mornings they don’t. I’ve known people who claimed to have had nightmares all night but were probably dreaming about sandwiches, and I’ve known many people who seemed like they were still half asleep for the first half hour. That seems peaceful somehow, but often they don’t see it this way. There are the people who wake up on fire, completely reset and ready for the world, already plotting their complex daily course, and then there are people whose very first thought is pancakes. This morning, my first thoughts were a jumble of chaos, and I think I know why. It has something to do with the covid shell we all went into.

A few weeks ago, I got a letter from a lawyer about a royalty statement for one of my books. At first, I couldn’t figure out which one. They wanted to send me a check, fine and dandy, but for what title? After a little back and forth, I found that a publisher I’d sent a manuscript to FIVE YEARS ago had published it a few months back. No contract, I’d rejected the offer. No galleys, no anything at all. I found it on Amazon and bought one before I shut it all down. They were even nice about it, but it was startling. Mid-sized publishers come in two shapes- lean and clean or inept and scammy. Thoughts of this tumbled around and mixed unpleasantly with reflections on a washed-up film producer I recently dealt with. Producers option material and almost all of them are pleasant. These are business people with an eye for art. This one was a kind of dead zone flounder who was much better suited working mid-level management at a Burger King in rural Alabama. Unpleasant snippets of this weirdo’s shell game blended with the ghost book and the background sound, the song playing along with this. Lucky Star by Madonna. How do I even know anything at all about that song?

It has to be the covid shell. Lots of people had a bad, scary run through what we’re starting to call ‘The Time of Covid’. Some people did just fine. I’m in the high middle- I did pretty okay. I even found it peaceful. But no matter what happened, good or bad, almost everyone had more time to themselves. And now that we’re all coming back? The weird shit seems weirder than ever. Abrasive fruit basket dipshittery that would normally slide past without a second glance seems as perplexing and abnormal was waking up to discover you have a tulip growing out of your belly button. What, pray tell, is the fastest way to readjust? Pretty sure music will do the trick. Something like this-