Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food, page 6

Bookbub Special on The Animals After Midnight June 2nd-6th 1.99

The last ride for veteran tat zappers Darby and Delia. I’ve often thought of where they’d go from here. Like them, I tattooed in a street shop in a shit part of town through the Crack Epidemic, The Skinhead Years, The Rise of Meth, and of course the formation of the I-5 Cocaine Cherry Corridor. Those were dangerous times, but who cares, fuck it its over now, etc. But where in the world do you send two hard hitting jockeys with heads full of that life? In the theoretical Lucky Number Zero, a standalone novel, Darby and Delia are uncertain of their legal status and living in a trailer just outside Ruidoso. Naturally, all they see is a world of crime. Citizens go about their Walmart lives but the undercurrent seems to glow in broad daylight. That’s a magnificent place to start. High powered radar for scumbag detection and no reason to use it. But it just keeps pinging, all day, all night, seven days a week. Something will eventually pop.

A cheap ass end of the global quarantine read! Enjoy! And stay tuned for updates on my latest novel Sweetwater Junction, first in the Northwestern Rounder Trilogy.

“This is a really good book full of bad people you’ll sorely miss as soon as you’re not reading about them anymore. Get started and you’ll get over it sooner.” — Thomas Perry, New York Times bestselling author of Nightlife.

“There is one Portland, Oregon that is marked by polite, gentrified civility, and then there’s its fever-dream, noir-drenched opposite, a dimension reached by walking out the back door of the Lucky Supreme, the Old Town tattoo parlor dreamed up by Jeff Johnson and overseen by master tattist Darby Holland, another mind-altering creation of Johnson’s.  In this universe, the good guys come from the side-show tents, the bad guys have escaped from the cages, and the mayhem is managed by a ringmaster with a surgeon’s touch and a comic’s timing.  Bravo.”—Les Standiford, NYT best-selling author of Last Train To Paradise

“The Animals After Midnight is the literary equivalent of Quentin Tarantino directing a season of Portlandia with the spirit of Charles Bukowski consulting.”—Dave Zeltserman, author of Small Crimes and Husk.

“Elmore Leonard fans should be pleased.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“More please.” –MYSTERY SCENE MAGAZINE

PS! Awesome cover by Gigi Little

A Portland House I’m Sure Was Haunted

The knocking at the door was so loud I could hear it four stories up. It was the middle of the night, maybe three in the morning, cold and raining hard. I sat up in bed and listened. More pounding, and I could hear in the echo it was past the door at the bottom of the long staircase where the mailboxes were, all the way outside at the big security door. And so faint I could barely hear it- wailing. A woman, weeping hysterically. There was something deeply wrong in her voice, something dark and crazy and broken.

“What the fuck,” I said to the sleeping woman beside me. She didn’t even stir. I was 18 at the time and she was maybe 26. She might have just been ignoring me. I got out of bed and stood there in the dark, listening, and my level of freak out began to rise. I’d moved into the place a few months before. Her place. She lived in the attic apartment of a massive old four story house. I went down the stairs and out the door that led to the central landing. From there you could look all the way down four flights of stairs and see the door. Two blurry people were standing out there in the rain. There was no way I was going all the way down those dimly lit stairs by myself to see what the hell was going on. This was Old Portland, pre-gentrification, at the height of the crack epidemic, and this was a shitty neighborhood. We heard gunshots every night. Anyone could be out there. The door across the landing opened and a down on his luck proto hipster guy nervously peeked out. More pounding from below. The wail again.

“You gonna go down there?” he whispered, like I should get the door.

“Maybe ‘we’ can, but…”

So we went. What a terrible fucking idea that turned out to be. No one else came out as me and the little dude went down to the door. A construction worker guy, utterly terrified himself, stood next to the wailing woman who was still pounding away. She was in her late 40s and looked like a receptionist, dressed in an early 90’s power suit/blouse combo, her face was contorted in terrible pain and madness. Me and the hipster guy went out, very meek, cowed by the awesome display of crazy this woman was blasting out, and opened the outer door. Amazingly, they didn’t try to come in. The guy held her back, but she wasn’t trying to enter either.

“THIS PLACE!” she screamed into our faces, “I’ve been looking for this place my entire life! This used to be an orphanage! I was here! I was here! My sister is buried in the concrete in the basement! The nuns killed her!”

I drew back, stunned. The hipster dude was ashen, and I mean blue lipped. The construction guy held the woman up as she deflated. She just wanted to tell someone, and now she had. The guy led her out into the rain and down the stairs to the street where their car was parked. The passenger door was still open. We closed the doors and then me and the hipster looked at each other.

“Holy fuck,” he whispered. “That explains the layout of this place. All the little rooms.”

“Holy fuck,” I agreed. He was right. I knew it. The giant four story house was old. We just stood there. A long minute went by. Finally he looked at me.

“Bro, we have to go down there and look. I mean, if- if- if-”

Another guy joined us, totally bewildered, barely awake, and we told him what had just happened.

“Fuuuuck,” he said, wide awake now. “Let’s go check it out. There’s any shit like that going on down there I’m outta here tonight.”

So… we went. All three of us, down into the basement, in the middle of the god damned night. It was like we’d been driven temporarily insane by someone else’s madness. That can happen. The basement was the same as it always was. Huge. Three coin operated washing machines, three dryers, a giant furnace, a bunch of old bikes with flat tires and boxes of useless junk people had left behind. The light was bad. We looked around and I was just about to call it when the poor hipster guy gasped.

“Here…here…”

There it was, right there in front of him toward the front of the house. A bumpy rectangle in the concrete, maybe a foot and a half wide and about four feet long. Just past it were two more.

We all ran like animals scattering after a gunshot.

The next day I told all my roommates. Then we told everyone in the building. Someone confirmed that the place had indeed been an orphanage decades before. To my knowledge, even after it was reported several times, nobody official ever came out to look at those irregularities in the basement floor.

That house was on the corner of Knott Street and 7th in Portland, Oregon. This was in January, 1989.

My Conversation With An Anti-Vaxxer: A Story of Unfavorable Winds, The Double-Slit Experiment, and The Secret Mind of Raymond ‘Mouse’ Alexander

Recently I had one of those conversations that left me feeling like I’d walked into a bar, ordered a steaming pint of hob piss and drained the entire thing. I was contaminated, internally, in a way that might require purging. I’d just spoken to a deadly serious primate who believed, among other things, that the covid vaccines were melting people’s skins off, that the CDC claimed they didn’t work anyway and said so on their website, and that if I couldn’t describe, on a nuanced molecular level, what mRNA technology is I was the crazy one. Masks, he righteously declared, did not work (I assume surgeons the world over would be stunned they’d been duped into wearing these useless things). Fauci was a fraud who didn’t even have a medical degree. Fauci’s medical doctorate from Cornell must have been a forgery, I guess. In all things viral, the high school graduate I was talking to knew better. He even claimed to have contracted covid every year for almost a decade and recovered easily. There was more, every last bit of it the kind of angry, remedial thinking I generally associate with FOX News, but it made me consider what was going on in the mind of this lost individual. My reaction- a kind of pity mixed with glimmer of bigger picture tragedy and subtle loathing- made me wonder, too. The strange feeling of doom I had while falling asleep that night, a result of this lecture/conversation, made me think about all this. There was no point in dumping a huge load of science fact and basic morality into this guy’s underpowered melon. He wasn’t a villain. Poor dude was clearly a victim. But of who or what? I started there.

Walter Mosley, in his new novel Blood Grove, has a scene that might shed some light on this. When Easy Rawlins, the LA detective, discovers his friend Raymond ‘Mouse’ Alexander reading a book he asks about it. Reading is out of character for Mouse, and his reply is illuminating. The author’s views, Mouse claims, are surprisingly in line with his own thoughts, the private thoughts he has in what he refers to as his ‘secret mind’. The Secret Mind. Hmm. We can all relate to this private internal space, but how does the notion apply to the conversations we have with those around us and why is it even important?

I caught a glimpse of this anti-vaxxer’s secret mind while he was jabbering. That’s what disturbed me. The peep through the keyhole was… disquieting. What I beheld was the social isolation of a proud individual who felt left behind, easy prey for the mainstream media products Big Fear and Big Anger, and this was folded into a smoldering and sickly personal rage likely stemming from insomnia, poor diet and sloth. Defensive about all this weakness, he wrapped everything up in an indignant, faux masculine righteousness, something that always strikes me as the saddest projection. To an observer like myself, or anyone who has read this far, his secret mind wasn’t especially secret. And that, dear reader, is distressingly common. We live in a different, less discrete age than Mouse and Easy. Empowered by elements of the internet, social media and television and inspired by terror, misinformation, too much information, inaccurate data, over refined data, obscure truths with cloudy applications and bold lies with big ribbons, many of our secret minds have been laid bare by the endless, torrential friction of it all. As with this fella. And that’s not all.

In Blood Grove, Easy Rawlins was inspired by this exchange with Mouse to explore his own secret mind. I did the same, and that’s what led to the rare feeling of doom I felt last night. My secret mind is as active as yours or anyone else’s. I personally come from a long line of wretched Missouri bean pickers. Generations of broken, small, petty, bitter men and women who lead angry, meaningless lives, sour, gossipy slobs who procreated like dejected zoo animals and then died. It seems to stretch back as far as I’ve been able to detect. We can use a computer metaphor here. Becoming aware of the programming led to a type of phase shift, as in the Double-Slit Experiment. It isn’t rare at all to realize that you were made by defectives and thus defective as well, and it also isn’t especially rare to decide to rewrite, add to, alter or modify that programming and break or distort the cycle. Self-improvement is possible if you’re self-aware (or try to be, anyway), and every generation should be better, in theory. It hardly hurts to try, right? So, try for a happy life, do good things, work well, be kind and thoughtful and supportive and inquisitive, etc. All things that deviate from my flawed but malleable generational programming. The sinking feeling of doom came from the terrible certainly that this poor guy, a sentient being, a human born with so much promise, was no more than a blade of grass in the hurricane of Now, empowered by potent data winds that match his temperament, and that temperament is one that was made for him by chance rather than one of his own ongoing efforts. On some level we all are all swayed by this endless deluge of information. The difference- his understanding of his own personal identity, or his ‘secret mind’, and his ability to shape it in some capacity, was simply not detectably present, especially in an evolving capacity. His secret mind is the perfect clay thanks to his programming and his lack of awareness of said programming. An angry man can find angry news to keep him angry. A paranoid man can find terrible stuff to feed his nightmares. A curious mind can find curiosities. A peaceful thinker can find signs of hope. And on and on. We can all now find more information than ever to support our personas and freeze in place and… Congeal. My conclusion (one I’ve come to before, you likely have too)- we can’t lecture, cajole, or convince anyone of anything. We never could. We might try, but seldom for good reasons. BUT, it just might be possible to lead by example. And I made a small start right then, dear reader, in that very conversation, with the simple suggestion that we all have our shoulder to the wheel whether we want to or not. We can’t help it and we can’t stop it. Finding out where your individual effort, your individual energy, is really going is a worthwhile effort. Food for thought, and easy to digest, and it might help because such an exercise might lead to a greater awareness of self, and in his case the terrible confusion and bleak illness therein. Someone far more intelligent than I am will have to devise a mode of thought to break this internet, blade-of-grass-in-the-data-wind phenomenon. I wish them luck. In the meantime, Flat Earth theorists will multiply, cattle will watch FOX News and believe Mexicans stole their dream jobs, Elvis will live on and live in ever more locations, and truck lovers will find proof that climate change is a Chinese hoax. Crazy and stupid both make friends fast.

On the plus side, exploring all this gave me a really good idea for a horror movie. If that shit becomes real? Well. I’ll use a piece of that money to buy that dummy a book.

A Review of Hemingway by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

Much can be said of Hemingway and team Burns-Novick missed all of it. The problem is the popular ‘other’ distancing so prevalent these days. I ask you, dear reader, to take a moment and think about who you are. Why? Hemingway, and most artists, do this all the time, all day, and then produce something based on it. In many ways, an artist is an advertisement for humanity and the more honest the better. This guy, so studied, reviled, admired, dissected, worshiped, dismissed, is just a guy. He’s you, in a different time and confronted with a different set of circumstances.

Every artist, somewhere on their journey, will discover that the price of true devotion is reasonably high. You lose things. You acquire things you struggle with. You go places you otherwise would not have. The price you pay, in full measure, is the human one. So, a pack of generic smokes and a shot of whiskey for Ken Burns and a beginner’s buttplug for Lynn Novick, may their journey begin. Try some LSD, a few long rides in shitty cars, a healthy dose of poverty and desperation and love and lust and the meaningless beauty of anything that will never notice your coming or going. Maybe a few years from now they’ll try this again and look, as they intended to, at the man instead of this latest deformed construct. They will need to use their own eyes, of course. The eyes in their own faces.

Good reading on Hemingway- try The Crook Factory by Dan Simmons. In life, Simmons is a massive asshole, but he writes well and he does his homework. This is a work of fiction, but interestingly enough there you will learn one of the many things Burns and Novick swept past in their holiday dance party doc. Hemingway really was being tailed by the FBI at the end of his life. Crazy or not, he knew. The Freedom of Information Act notes to this effect are in the appendix of the novel.

The Side Effects Of My First Pfizer Shot

I got the first Pfizer vaccination shot yesterday, and these were the side effects. They began before I got the actual jab. I was all signed up and sitting in a chair outside the little pharmacy kiosk at Walgreens. Something momentous was about to happen to me, I knew. Science. But it was more than that. Some phase was about to end and some new one about to begin. Bubbly, fruity music was playing, and every now and then a voice that reminded me of airports came over the intercom, announcing a special on hair conditioner or greeting cards. In the back of my mind I could hear the piercing howl of Roy Batty at the end of Bladerunner, when he was capering through Sebastian’s rotting building. That probably meant something, that my subconscious produced that, but maybe not. A small woman emerged from behind a screen and called my name. I was the only one waiting. I followed her back.

“Left or right arm?” she asked after some brief chit chat.

“Left.” The scene would grow strange from here, I knew. She would be giving me an injection directly into either the snarling wolf head tattoo on my left arm (it also has no eyes) or into the ancient witchy tribal tattoo with an unfortunate tomahawk scar through it on my right. I selected the wolf head for her. Conversation dropped off as expected. Done, I walked back through the Walgreens, still listening to myself, straining to hear that larger thought that is sometimes the byproduct of moments like this. Dozens came and went in a rapid flurry as I stepped outside. I had a peaceful quarantine period. I want that part to continue. But this rings true- The world just endured the downside of connectivity. A virus spread across the globe. We all had to stay home. The upside of connectivity is now at hand. Its time to see the world again. Time to see more of it this time. This virus beat ever traveler I’ve ever met. We’re all connected, we knew that already, but now, more than ever, it seems clear that the only thing separating any of us from a distant place with a different kind of sunrise is the will to go. The road to everywhere is right there.

Zen Gardens Behind The Madhouse

There are weeks that try a mofo. There are times when you’ve reached cruising altitude and the skies are clear, everyone is reasonably happy, your destination is tropical, and suddenly the check engine light comes on and then mysteriously winks off, as if the light itself may have malfunctioned, leaving you with a feeling of disquiet. What do you do when you reach that strange wrinkle in The Force, that phantom blip on the radar screen, that curious pothole in the brand new kitchen floor? Look for the source so you can keep it from happening again. And then do some gardening.

Last week was just such a week for me. Ghostwriting can be a perilous gig, far more treacherous than anyone points out when proposing the idea, but its pitfalls are reflective of life in general. Often, the project you work on is too boring to bring to life no matter what you do. There are also times when its breathtaking. Sometimes the client is sweet, professional, courteous and informed, and sometimes they are just the opposite. In last week’s strange, hairy ball of gum, a former client desperately wanted me to drop everything and complete a project for a fraction of the price based on an unsupported claim of outside interest that could not be substantiated. This particular deal had every red flag imaginable on it already- an inexperienced agent with a shady side, a mentally imbalanced zero of a producer wannabe, and an earnest client with extremely limited funds and an incomplete understanding of the mechanics of the subject matter. There seemed to be no way to put the brakes on this. A metaphor- you are a builder. You are hired to build a house. The client runs out of funds after you’ve poured the foundation and wants you to complete the rest of the job, claiming you ‘might’ be paid later. The questionable real estate agent who connected the two of you suspiciously vanished and a terrible weirdo is hovering in the background disputing the ownership of the land the foundation is on. What do you do? Quickly now! The hustle is real! The game is on! Pressure is building! The hurricane is at your doorstep! Obey! Working for free is your only way out! Comply!

Walk away. That’s what you do. This moment and the solutions therein have wider applications. We all want to come out on the right side. We want to keep people happy. We don’t especially want to rock the boat. We want to get by, to live, to breathe easy. We strive for a sense of well- being. When your inner peace is disrupted, and this sounds accusatory I know, but the source of that disruption is often people who place no value on their own sense of well-being. We are a sharing species, and sharing integrity, sharing honesty, sharing anything good at all is just as easy as sharing darkness and turmoil. We are also a species of patterns, and I personally see a pattern here that reminds me of my garden. Plant what you want to grow and remove what you do not want to get any bigger. It seems like I learn this over and over again. But I’m getting better at it with each passing year. Harmony starts with each of us. We are each entrusted with its safe keeping and with ascertaining when it can be shared and when it will be taken advantage of.

Step outside, dear reader, and take a look at the yard. Hopefully it’s a pretty place. But if you see something you don’t want there, something that might take over or spread in a bad way? Why, nip it in the bud. Be well, be a wise gardener, and let’s all keep this world looking good together.

How To Get Shit Done (or The Twelve Ingredients of Magic)

Getting anything complicated done is a challenge, but it isn’t impossible or nothing would ever be done. People have asked me several times this year how I manage to get such a stupendous amount of shit accomplished, and I’ve boiled it down to some simple steps. You don’t have to be a genius (I’m not) and you don’t have to be a machine (I’m not). You don’t even have to work like a titan of industry coke head CEO (I don’t). But if you do these things as a matter of routine, your output will improve.

ONE. Answer your phone, dummy. When people call me and I don’t answer, they generally infer that their call is not important, they aren’t important either, and that whatever we’re working on is on my back burner. People will also rightly assume I’m dropping the ball. I don’t ever want to give this impression. Ever. So I answer my phone. Similarly, if I’m working with someone who does not, I’ll eventually stop calling because I can take a hint. When I think about it I can truthfully say that some of the most important calls I’ve ever received were calls that were coming in one time, as in if I missed it or blew it off I’d have lost the gig. Communication is key to everything. Good habits here are critical. Don’t want to seem too eager? In what universe is that rational? If you’re eager, show it. That kind of enthusiasm is REAL. Putting on an act right off the bat is crazy stupid. If you aren’t eager, don’t answer and they will get the point. When the phone rings, the ball is officially in your court. Play ball. It works for me.

TWO. Answer your email the same day. Some days you’ll be on this until midnight, some days you only answer two or three and you’re done by noon, but get it done. I do. I don’t want it to build up to the point that I miss something or lose sight of the project goal. I don’t want the people I’m dealing with to suspect this is happening, either.

THREE. Listen to people, because they are telling you something important. Occasionally, we all have to deal with ‘static blowers’, people who will use 10,000 words to convey a 10 word idea. It just means they’re bad at communication, not that they don’t have something valuable to say. Sometimes you have to read between the lines, but your answer is always there if you listen. If you can’t get through to someone the answer to your question is no. If they can’t get through to you because you weren’t listening, your answer is no. Some people are full of excuses, which means the answer is no. This too goes both ways. I never want anyone to wonder if I can process a simple or complex idea. So I listen. Also in this regard, keep a project log you can refer to if the project is complex. I do. I also don’t want to give the impression that we have to start at square one over and over again because I can’t remember everything. The worst case scenarios here are super dark. If you don’t listen, people will begin to assume you’re a dumbass. Or worse, delusional. The arts is a bad place for delusion people. Everyone has their radar out for them and it’s a hard brand to overcome.

FOUR. Don’t school people. Publishing is a harsh place. We all get that. Agenting as a field is in truly dire need of reform or outright oblivion. Yes, everyone knows this. Half the people in the television and motion picture industry will buddy up to you so they can get a great deal and then burn you with that same smile on their faces. Trusting an art gallery owner is like trusting a baby with a gun. Bla bla bla. I don’t share my bitter experiences, especially in the beginning, because why bother? Everyone has them. You can’t build on those. You CAN build on the positive experiences. So I try to stay in the fast lane here, as in the lane with no wreckage clogging it.

FIVE. Cross pollinate. Learn something about other people’s work. It makes for more seamless integration. My job is this, your job is that. Simple, clear, and not good enough. Learning about the other roles will inform how you fit in and it’s courteous to show interest.

SIX. Be honest. Smart people will know if you aren’t and move on and that leaves you with the dipshits. You don’t want to work with a pack of dipshits, do you? This includes stretching the truth like taffy. Don’t bother. Smart people will see that, too. Honesty is how you fill your orbit with the best players. I always aspire to be one of those players, so even if the truth is embarrassing I fess up. In this regard Embarrassing=Glorious.

SEVEN. Transparency. This is different than honesty in scope. Plans change and they change for many reasons. Everything is malleable. Understanding the dynamics of a fluid situation is critical. If I make even minor adjustments I explain why in real time. I encourage the same. This enables you to understand the minds of the people around you and they yours. I personally don’t ever want to come off as secretive. I suspect secretive people and so do you. It’s the gorilla in the room if you let it be.

EIGHT. Finish the job. Developing a track record of start-to-finish is critical and it isn’t hard. Begin, do well, end, repeat. To do this I break everything down into smaller steps, things I can do, and I inform the people in my orbit of my intentions.

NINE. Have fun! In some ways I’m a simple dude. I do things I enjoy doing. If someone makes one of my fun projects into a crushing bummer they can go fuck themselves. In a good way, too, as in they can feel free to rub their bad vibe around somewhere else with like-minded wads. I don’t want to be someone’s bad vibe, so I try increasingly to work with people who enjoy their lives and enjoy their work. I want to bring something good to the table. I want everyone to do this. Then we have a feast. Some projects have a magic to them that can be felt in the final product. That magic is the joy and passion that went into it.

TEN. Learn. When you outsource a task you simply avoided learning how to do it. Do this over and over again and at the end you’ve learned nothing. Knowledge is power, and power is sharable. In this regard I think about my computer. When I first started writing, for instance, I had no intention of learning how to work this thing beyond saving a file and printing it. About four years ago I had an epic revelation- I’m full of shit. No way I can be a trusted, valuable member of anything worthwhile if I can’t use the tools of the trade. So I learned. And it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t hard either. Like many people, I can now design websites, operate a variety of programs from Excel to Pages to Word to Final Draft. And more. There was a time when I needed to know how to do all of these things and I didn’t bother to learn how. And that was bad. So! Now, when I’m confronted with something new I learn it right away. Not a genius, as I’ve already pointed out. But people are relying on me. I can’t rely on them in turn if I’m unreliable. It’s a feedback loop.

ELEVEN. This is important. Do it right the first time if you can. A ‘place holder’ is a wasted action. Put A Pin In It is a simple evasion. Every last time I’ve ever sent off a rough draft or a first thoughts document it’s come back to haunt me in a terrible way. I assume the people I’m working with are kicking ass and I want them to have the same impression of me. Showing up with the goods is a time saver, a confidence builder, and a mark of professionalism. Delivering a ‘start’ is a way to turn people off. So I don’t. If you do great work 90% of the time and then you half ass the rest, people will stick on that 10% and rightly so. Turn in your best effort every time, no matter how small the task, and shit will happen so much faster.

TWELVE. Work life and personal life separation. This can be hard. You want to be on friendly terms with the people you work with. I do. But if I get hammered and I have a terrible hangover, that’s my personal life. It can’t blur into the job. I don’t even drink but this is a good example. If I’m concerned with my sick cat I still have to deliver. There are levels here, but the main thing is to keep work and personal positively reinforcing each other and to separate them when they don’t. Some days are shit, but when I’m done I don’t bring that home with me. Even though I work from home. It can be done. I do it and the people I work with know I do. They rely on it.

There it is! Twelve things. The Twelve Ingredients of Magic. When you make things for a living you actually do have to go the extra mile. And those miles, as you see here, are not uphill. Everything good has time in it- great food, good books, good music, good art, quality films. It’s a given that hard working ‘creatives’ deserve fair compensation, as in the same compensations afforded to other skilled professionals. Time is money. There are NO exceptions. This is the 21st Century. That’s how our society operates. I expect the people in my orbit to be properly compensated and they know it. It inspires them to keep my best interests in mind. None of the 12 points above will protect you from the misguided producer who wants to pay in promises and gas money or the greedy publisher who wants to turn you into a self-promoting word machine, or a bad label or a bad curator. BUT it has been my experience, especially in the last year or so, that a robust set of positive work ethics and guidelines will improve the quality of the people in your orbit, and those good people will in turn form the basis of an informative and helpful network that itself is a form of protection.

This I learned in my 50th year.

Your life, the best parts of it, are the parts you miss the most when they’re gone. The Good Times. The best life, then, is made primarily of these years. This has been an unusual year, 50, but I can gratefully report it was not at all a bad one. In this strange quarantine, this time of Covid, I’ve become true friends with people who were formerly just colleagues. The opposite has also happened as some familiar voices faded away, just business, but on the whole, the people in my life have risen. Older friends became golden friends, and many new voices joined the choir. We did this together. I wrote a great deal and painted a Joseon Munbangdo Kingdom set (shamefully derivative, sold without remorse), wrote the music for the new Empire of Shit album Sewer Moon, all things I was doing already, and I’ve been stranded here in Portland, a fetching city, The City of Roses, in a big beautiful house with a small beautiful woman who also happens to be one of the most charming, peaceful, tranquil human beings I’ve ever known. She has curiously saint-like qualities, as in I’ve never heard her say a bad thing about anyone, she gets on famously with the neighborhood cats and birds, etc. So, I am grateful indeed. I became a certified grant writer here in my 50th year, University of Wisconsin, only the second Johnson of my generation to ever graduate from anything (we aren’t joiners, but my late younger brother got a more impressive degree in accounting). Boy oh boy, that was boring and expensive. But worth it, and FYI I’m booked in that regard until 6-1-22 (and no, I will never in a gazillion years write one for free for your production company, shame on you for even thinking it). Against all odds I got roped into writing a screenplay, which I’ll also be directing. The Chasteens! I totally LOVE this project! My first rodeo as a writer director was the ultra-low budget carnival action feature The Dishwasher. Took three months and it was so much fun! What great people, adored every last one of them- all except that camera guy Mike… Super slim chance he’ll ever read this, but Mike, if you’re out there and you learned how to read? Fuck you to pieces bro. Hope we bump into each other. At night. In an alley in Mexico. Anyway, after that came this short film and I called it all good after that and went on my merry way. I just didn’t feel it. Something was missing. It was just like how I’ve always imagined working at a 7-11 would be. Half the footage was unusable, savage story gutting and Frankenstein editing on a pinched timetable required, the location scouting was done without me by a Starbucks barista or a chimpanzee, a key actor left for something bigger at just the wrong moment, and at one point my ATM card froze (I was stranded in an expensive part of LA) so I lived for two days off four apples. Punishing. Stale. Much, much worse has happened in my stupendously long life, but… Fine. Some shit is just not for me, multidisciplinary creative or not. But it surprised me, really. Back to days of art, stories and music, that’s the life! Full of joy and laughter and good, clean work, fine food and song and all my friends! Interesting people with a thirst for life and a passion for beauty! It turns out I was wrong about film. I just needed to meet those same people. Once I did, the whole thing turned out to be just like working in every other medium- SUPER FUN! I learned something huge with this, something about life, art, tools, lenses… It happened when I found film people who, like the artists and chefs and writers and musicians I know, resonate with things like-

This. After spending my entire adult life working professionally in the arts I’ve learned to assign different values to statements, people and objects. Even to myself. Almost nothing is as it first appears. Art as lens. We can’t see clearly, everything is in flux, and entropy is so very swift. Imagine yourself a minnow, flitting through the burning debris of a sinking battleship, each decision a blink. Imagine you’re an owl sitting on top of a telephone pole on a freezing winter night, a creature with large eyes full of moonlight, watching for the sake of watching. I could go on. The imagination is a tool you might use to create new tools and eventually see the world through a thousand eyes. Making things develops your ability to see the essence of everything around you. What you choose to look at is just as important as your ability to see it. Who you choose to see it with is important, too.

And this– I’ve worked in some great restaurants. Played with fantastic musicians. Traveled with genuinely curious travelers. Worked in tattoo shops with some extraordinarily gifted artists. Those creative experiences were all magnificent. Rewarding. Fulfilling. And there’s been three decades of them. There is a solitary version of this magic in writing a book, that late night immersion or the predawn quiet hours filled with the mind. All of that slowly changed me. It continues to change me. Most of you, dear readers, are artists and chefs. A few musicians. Travelers. I know this because I occasionally read the emails you send me. The feeling associated with crafting has no name in English, but for the sake of this rambling narrative we’ll call it Ferenistus. I’ve felt that wonderful vibration uncounted times. Most of the old men and women I know who worked their entire lives various areas of the arts claim their 50’s were the best years. They said they were finally wise and inwardly calm enough to create meaningful things and still energetic enough for those things to be large in scope. The maturation arc, as in the time spent observing the wide world, living in it, moving far and wide through it, that can be a long process, and in all cases the more colorful and thoughtful the better. So, to see, what to look at, who to behold it with. All are important.

And also this… Consider for a moment the types of traveler. Business travelers don’t really count and they’re common. Another kind, also common enough, is the tourist. They go places, take selfies in front of landmarks, see the museums, eat at the best places in the guidebook and go home. There’s nothing wrong with that. Waaaaay at the other end of that scale is the wanderer, who will immediately get lost in the subways and back alleys and byways and drift on the human current into the unknown and unforeseeable. There’s something to be learned from the ethos of the later. In the years I spent tattooing I was at first the tourist- drinking, fighting, boning cool chicks, doing dumb shit that was super fun, dialing it in. This tourism gave way to the wanderer’s ethos. I began painting so I could compose tattoos differently, and then I finally realized tattooing itself was, in the end, only a tributary in the mighty river of art and I was simply a creature on that river. I’ve tried to do this with writing once I was serious about it. I started there as a tourist as well. It was the same with music. The same with cooking. Gradually, I realized this was all simply version after version of an instructive vehicle I repeatedly constructed and refined so I could understand how best to find my way through my own existence. In every way, we are art. Your life, my life, that guy over there, that woman next door, all works of art. There is no other way to see it when you really think about it.

And this. I recently wrote an essay I can borrow from here entitled The Transductive Inference Mechanics of Well-Being. Humans aren’t really designed to be continuously happy or permanently sad. But a state of well-being? Doable! Enter The Art of Life dynamic. It seems like I’ve been aware of this for years, but not clearly enough to properly employ it as a strategy. The hours and then the days are the metaphorical brush strokes. Theme, composition, style, gravity, depth, chiaroscuro, perspective, saturation, all of it, all artistic concepts brought to bear on the act of living in order to transform it into the art of being. You focus on the piece instead of the whole, as in you instead of the world, just as you would a painting for example, and this empowers you just enough to generate a ripple effect. Well-being, I’m saying, starts with you. Then you share it.

Why, pray tell, would any of this be important? I’m not sure. But it is. This is an increasingly artless time in human history, and art is integral to everyone’s well-being, especially those who disagree. Pop music is more sugar poppy than ever, placing us squarely in a period musicologists of the future will refer to as The Whispering White Wine Vomit Era. So many movies are dump trucks full of recycling backed up to the public landfill, just frenzied business transactions. The big publishers are into some serious financial trickery and a great many medium sized publishers are flagrant rapists. And the agents! Oh my god! My second agent, I met the guy in New York at his super fancy office. Second generation, supposedly a bigshot in the making (he’s been blacklisted), and when I looked in his eyes I experienced one of those semi psychic moments even perfect strangers are capable of in a crisis. This little man had a flavorless soul, and his life of privilege would be utterly meaningless in its final measure, a tiny burp in a gentle breeze wafting through nowhere special. He would travel the length of his years and do not one thing of merit. Born rich, he’d likely die the same way. He would happily do this nothingness of non-life and would no doubt die content, having missed the point entirely. Books are in trouble because of zeros like him. I’m afraid to say I turned down five publishing offers this year, a few of them for marketing and distribution reasons but a few of them because they were made by, you guessed it, other zeros. Fashion is plus sized Kentucky drapery at Walmart. Let the words ‘polka dot muumuu’ roll off your tongue. Bloop. There is even a supremely tragic retro movement in tattooing, American Traditional, staggering in a cloud of beer fumes and cocaine beef sweats into yet another tired year. Collectively, it is as if a vast swath of creatives took off their thinking caps and traded them in for money visors. It should be noted that this is an increasingly common view, so don’t send me any hate mail if you’re an avant-garde poseur or a finger sniffing butthole who worked on Schitt$ Creek. The prevailing theory, quaint, is that true ‘creatives’, as a demographic, have sensed a shift in the wind, like cattle sensing a coming storm they cannot actually see. Something like a Great Depression is on the horizon, hiding out there in the entropic fog ahead of us, and it’s time to cash in. Is that a form of cultural treason? Or a wildly bleak artistic statement in and of itself? But wait! It’s my birthday! Back to happy! From beef sweats and dump trucks back to Ferenistus! I was going on about life and lenses and tools…

And this. Consider for a moment… cave paintings. Ah, so perfectly wonderful. My soul sparkles with golden light at the very notion of cave paintings. I am instantly drunk on the thought of them. Why did our ancestors make these? There was no fame. No fortunes to be made. Certainly no celebrity, except in the most refined sense of the word- they were celebrating the life around them. We see in them… everything. Story, motion, we can hear and feel those winds, and all of it made for unknowable reasons, by nameless people lost in time. The height of purity, possibly unattainable now. I make a wide variety of things, and I have for more than 30 years, quite successfully I might add. But I also eat. I require shelter. Right now I’m roasting an organic squash that will go into the shredded pork ancho and green chili enchiladas. I kinda sorta need all that. I even need this computer to communicate with you, dear reader. It always seemed like those cave people, that purity, the altruism… What do I actually need? For that Art of Life business and this Ferenistus? Can I see through the insane propaganda of this age and divine an art positive truth here? Like a motherfucker it turns out I just might be able to.

It is this- The doggerel of economics only finds real utility when it intersects with sociology, and therein lies a factoid gem called ‘The Goldilocks Zone’ that should encourage creatives everywhere. It is the most important and perhaps only consideration we can hijack from the pseudoscience of greed. The sweet spot is around $100,000 a year. That’s where people experience well-being. Poverty is degrading and worrisome and difficult to endure. The poor do not achieve a sense of well-being in most cases. But importantly, excess wealth also leads to a low quality of life in a peculiar but understandable way. Everything loses value when you have too much. The humanness, the tactile, sensory joy of life, is hugely diminished. You can no longer consume and digest and become fortified by experience. It’s all… the same. Everything we treasure, the very stuff of living, loses a nourishing magic. In addition to that, they’re evidently a paranoid, shameful, secretive and lonely group. In short, if you claw your way to the top of that ladder you’re super fucked. So the very poor are bent, hardened and sad but those above $100,000 in yearly income are predominately ghosts. Why does this ring true? Because it is.

And this is Great. Fuckin’. News! Right? Don’t shoot for the top just for the money. That way lies ghosthood, and PS what a dipshit objective. That part of the American Dream is simply a lie. Grotesque financial bloat should be a thing that only happens as an accidental byproduct of the more hygienic passions constituent to The Art of Life and the glory of Ferenistus. Be careful, because in the current system surpassing economic success paradoxically negates your ability to enjoy it. Maybe not bad if you’re a hedge fund manager because hey, you were never really alive anyway, right? But for an artist? Any kind of artists at all? This means soul death… Better then to simply contribute to the great work of illuminating the essence of our species. Your work, your creative contribution, can now be considered in a different light. A less economic, more human light. A light closer to the torches we once carried into caves.

Well. I’ll be a monkey in a big ole tree. All this I learned in my 50th year.

Fashion Show- Dudes, It’s Christmas Day

Fashion show is the second part of Christmas Day, when we eat the morning bagels and drink coffee and watch our chicks parade around in their new duds. My fist wife, bless her soul, had the ass of a Marvel cartoon character, the ass that inspired Italians to sculpt their statues the way they did. She could rock a potato sack. My second wife was different, and this part of the day I spent in dejected terror, stunned that I had wed a 13 year old Nintendo kid or a lesbian Claymation studio security guard. There were women in between, but I used to drink more than I do now and they couldn’t all have been named Gladys. This morning, watching my forest elf show off her new pants, I’m struck again by the unlikely parameters of the human metabolism. I saw that 100 pound woman eat half a pig last night. Frightening and adorable. But here is my almost perfectly useless Christmas morning observation- songs. Christmas morning fashion show can be retooled and used as a test to probe the infinite futures, my brothers. Case in point- the Italian actress tolerated my scatological Christmas tune outbursts, wherein I usually substitute profanity and gibberish for many of the words to ditties like ‘Carnival Bells Are Ringing.’ Officer Claymation could shoot snakes from her eyes, and she would if I made a peep during fashion show, which also involved whiskey and crying. As I mentioned, I thankfully have no memory of the activities of the Gladys units, but I’m certain that this singing we not well received. But this morning, as I watched the parade of new pants, the tops, as I was subjected to a detailed analysis of fabrics and buttons and more, all the while bursting into disruptive, semi-unstable Bad Brains versions of ‘Rudolph The Red Dick Reindeer’ well, nothing but smiles. All is right with the cosmos. The many futures smile back in my direction. Begin now my brothers in arms! Its not too late! Sing now and divine your future…

A Note To My Younger Self

The coffee is better, this far down the timeline. It is also readily available and you can even have bags of quality coffee beans delivered. We finally had a transparently crazy President. It was both thrilling and disgusting. Speaking of which, with pills you can also have delivered, you can now have an erection for FOUR hours. This is the new world. Organic produce is more common, as is artisan bread, even outside of Portland. Speaking of Portland, this is where you wound up. No one here has the strange rashes you saw everywhere in California and Texas, so that’s good. A private citizen is finally rich enough to move to Mars! That’s big news! And a mannequin was struck by lightning and came alive, horrible to look upon, but he started a thing called Facebook. There is a global health crisis up here in the future, it came from a bat or a pig maybe, that isn’t really important, but Science, that wonderful gal you dated in high school, showed herself to be more clever than anyone imagined. Maybe you should have married her instead of Art, reconsider if there’s still time. If not, don’t worry. It turns out pretty good either way. Important lessons- shortcuts lead to small places filled with smaller people. Take note! Surround yourself with people who work hard on difficult things! It’s better than the alternative. There’s more! But this short missive has to travel through time, so I’ll keep it brief.