Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food, page 7

All The Thanksgivings

So many at this point, but not too many of them stand out. Once when I was a kid, oh, 15 or so, I dined on the spectacular repast of half a can of green beans. A year or two later, the memorable Thanksgiving meal was half a bag of old tortillas. There was the Thanksgiving where… I don’t remember where I was, but on the drive home I discovered Jake’s Famous Crawfish was open and on a whim I stopped and there, on a frosty Thanksgiving night, I ate oysters with snobs and got so wasted on expensive scotch I had to take a cab the rest of the way home. Sweet. Some ten years after that on another Thanksgiving I ate a gas station hot dog, with squirt chili and cheese sauce, and the chubby Van Halen gal drinking a 40 by the trash can next to me gave me a halfway decent blowjob. Lot of ups a downs over the years. So many of them were stale, unmemorable to the point where I don’t remember them at all. I assume that those are the ones where I was wearing a sweater, smiling and nodding and attempting to blend in with a crowd of bland yuppies and The Voluntarily Dead. But there was one Thanksgiving that stood out in my memory this morning. The time machine Thanksgiving. The Holiday Of The Toothless Kid.

It started off, I can guess, on a zero of some kind. Thanksgiving, another Tuesday in a year of weekdays that flowed without turbulence into an early dinner with the glamorous wine drinking cheese plate people of that time, then I left and went home. No memory at all, so that’s conjecture. But then… then something magical happened. I decided, as I often did in those days, to go get moderately trashed. Sometimes you have to rinse the cave dirt and cemetery fumes out of your head and that’s what I was doing. There was a dive bar near my place and they were open, so away I went. On the way I passed this café and inside was a Dickensian scene that hit me like lightning. 20 or so punk kids, all between 14 and maybe 19, eating like wolves. It turned out to be a sort of impromptu charity event. I talked to the lady who ran the place and then I went home, got the four sweet potato pies I’d decided not to bring to Thanksgiving, and came back with them. None of them wanted anything at all to do with sweet potato pie except The Toothless Kid. He ate one, right out of the tin, and told me his story about riding trains, sniffing glue in Denver, running from security dogs, typical crust punk stuff, but I wasn’t really listening. I was instead, for a moment, sailing with no land in sight once again, transported by his vibe. There is no word in English for the distilled essence of the priceless elixir made from Wild, Dreaming, The Moment, Soul, The Horizon, Sound and Light and a dash of Whimsy, but I remember the taste and I can taste it now. Who, in the end, is the luckier? That kid filled with eternal lightning or your Claymation boss? I hope you get to drink some this nameless magic this Thanksgiving and I hope when you do it reminds you of… You.

Exciting year, considering. Head over to http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com and check out some groovy shit I’m also thankful for.

Elections and a Stone Cold Tiny Teaspoon of Guts

People say Democrats, as politicians, have no spleen. No guts. They’re whiny. They never get anything done. And the average voter about town liberal, little skip doodle dandy, can be sorta kinda a little bit on the shitty side. For the most part this is all true. BUT. The Republican truck driving, fart huffin, sister groping zealots are deeply shitty, and worse, they’re a pack of bootlicking toadie suckers lining up for a good ole fashioned iron rod of War Jesus cornholing by some greedy, truly despicable monsters. Top of the party to the lowest dummy, all fucked. Don’t laugh! Those cretins are real! The people fooling them are no joke. That’s modern American politics. But tonight, as the nation boils, brimming over the top and slopping down the sides like a vat of ten day old herring gumbo with horseflies in it, I realize the Democratic leadership does have a tiny teaspoon of guts. It took guts to run a creepy old sack of shit like Hillary Clinton against a monster. Genuine balls. Biden is a safe bet, but only just. The only Democrats I know who are enthusiastic about Biden? A Hollywood jizz toilet who was worried about her Botox so Bernie Sanders was OUT (?). Two dipsticks who think ‘we need someone soothing’ (like the President and a therapist should have something in common) and three soccer moms, all three of whom would instantly call the cops on a homeless person who happened on to their suburban street. No, the bet is we will all be so fucking scared of four more years of Trump that we’ll vote for Biden. And that, dear reader, takes a stone cold teaspoon of guts. Seems like gambling. I don’t gamble myself, but if I did? I wouldn’t gamble with your children’s future, or women’s rights, or the environment, or human rights, or… any of it. But here we are. So remember when you vote you have a human right underneath your American rights. You are, first and foremost, an animal just barely out of the savanna. You still have the right to be pissed. That right has nothing to do with your birth certificate. It’s in your DNA.

Understanding The MAGA Hat- what’s really underneath the red cap

Some years ago I worked next to a Mercedes engine reconditioning place. The owner was a rich guy and he initially hated having a tattoo shop next door, but there was nothing he could do and after a year or two he finally stopped fucking with us. Almost five years into our turbulent relationship as neighbors I noticed he looked depressed. His wife had stopped coming around and he spent so much time at the garage that it almost seemed like he lived there. So I asked him if he was okay and to my astonishment he said ‘No’. And he was sad in a sincere, lonely way, so much so that I took him out for a drink right then and there. That act of diplomacy was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, one I greatly benefit from, because this dude turned out to be WISE.

Ed, I’ll call him, was born in Iran. He went to school in London. After a brief time in New York he finally settled in Portland. In addition to English, the guy speaks Farsi, German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Chinese, and Russian. His observations are priceless- insightful, foreign to the point of alien, and incredibly keen. One day we went out to lunch and we were driving back in one of his insanely expensive cars when he almost wrecked. He’d been seized by a fit of rage! At the sight of a guy wearing a… Portland Trailblazers jersey.

“The Looking Man,” he growled in disgust, pointing.

“The sports guy? You know him?”

“I know his kind.” Ed spit in his own ride he was so disgusted. “The Looking Man watches the sports on TV. He watches instead of playing. Do you know what that same man does?” Without waiting for an answer he continued, almost too ashamed to talk about it. “He watches the pornography. It is the same. This man with his sporting shirt walks through the world telling us all that he loves the masturbation. He says to us women are fine, but I PREFER TO TOUCH MYSELF. This is what he screams into my eyes! I only want to drive! I do not want to know of this man’s private life! Did I ask him? Sir, do you masturbate to the television? Why does he need to tell me this!”

Well. Ew. But eye opening. It sounds true too, admit it (sorry sports weenies). How does this apply to the MAGA hat? By wearing it, what are people really saying? It’s more than I Support Trump. The Masturbating Watching Man logic holds across the board, so what else are they really advertising in the way jersey guy is advertising his love of porn? I think we can see the surface and even that’s embarrassing. They’re saying- “I am angry. At black people. Women. Mexicans. Foreign food and electric cars. Climate change and any change. I am angry because I am AFRAID.” If you look at the news you can see why. Its fucking terrifying. But that isn’t it. That’s only the surface. Underneath and behind that, what separates compassionate, science minded, equality embracing individuals from the people under the MAGA hats? It isn’t bravery. I know so many phony, spineless liberals. What’s truly at the center of the MAGA yellow belly?

Sorrow is part of it. It has to be. Rage and fear are the two most common flowers of sorrow. Deep down, these people are sad. Most of them are poor, so the economy left them behind. Most of them are poorly educated. So the world itself has outpaced them. The exceptions here, the wealthy, educated MAGA mechanics, are paradoxically afraid of… the poor and uneducated who happen to be angry and afraid- and those same poor, ignorant people have guns! How… sad. This would be comical social engineering plot if were happening on a TV show.

Then there’s Al, another old guy I’m friends with. Al is a South African Jew who moved to New York in the late 70’s and owned one of the restaurants on Fire Island back in the heyday. He married a sweet woman named Lucille and moved to LA, prospered there for a time and then finally settled in Portland in the mid 1980’s. I worked for him at a swank restaurant in 1988 but we bonded at a food festival of some kind when Horstmager, the German entrepreneur behind many prosperous Portland food ventures, decided to come on over and fuck with Al. It was the Jewish thing. I was super stoned that day, a young hard rockin’ 18 year old in love with cooking, food, waitresses in general, and I took exception to this sunburned German monster, so much so that I ambled over and asked Al if he wanted me to stab the guy. Shock all around! It was, I thought, hilarious, but it was touch and go for a few days until Al finally came around and commended me for a job poorly conceived but well done. Al is a master at hiring, as in it often seems as though he can read peoples minds. I asked him about this one time a few years ago and his logic was astounding. “In an interview, get close. Find out why someone left their old job, as in the real human reasons. They’ll telegraph their own weaknesses and their future with your company. If they say ‘Those people didn’t know how to run a business’ then the interviewee very likely has no idea how to run a business. If he says ‘They’re all crooks’ then you’re talking to a potential crook. People shine the light on their own worst attributes. This exact same sentiment was echoed by my pal Darren, who runs the oldest tattoo shop in Manhattan, hailing from all the way back to the underground days. Interesting.

By Al’s logic, the sadistic hatred the MAGA people have for what they perceive as ‘weakness’ is very revealing. Take the mask, an accessory that does NOT go with the hat. The mask is a sign of weakness. They strain to believe liberals are weak and harp incessantly on it. These people evidently feel, deep down, that they’re weak themselves. They’re telegraphic it through megaphones.

The wisdom of old people. Both these guys have a few things in common. They both worked incredibly hard for decades and they both claim that hard work is a good way to get to know people. I agree. Success in work, as in working with great dedication and perseverance and seeing positive results, is well known to be one of the keys to happiness and fulfilment, especially for men, and that wholesome brand of goodness can make a fella wise. As in worth listening to, for me anyway. They’re both impossible troublemakers, too, especially ‘Ed’. So thanks Ed, you cool old dude. Your strange insight has allowed us to see the sorrowful among us. And, of course, those championship masturbaters. And to you Al (I know you can cook you bullshitter), thanks for showing us the sissies in our midst. Sorrow and weakness.

What shitty things to advertise.

You Are Just Like Enchilada Sauce And So Am I

Interesting thing, enchilada sauce. Rumor has it that when you’re doing something mundane you’re using your brain’s ‘First Tier’ and the juicy bulk of your gray matter, the part associated with complex reasoning, is free to roam. Making sauce of any kind is mundane, but enchilada sauce is also a revealing metaphor. How so? Here. When I first started making my own enchilada sauce I copied the ingredients on a can and experimented until I got it. Easy enough. I did the same thing with BBQ sauce at one point. Mustard. Pickles. All this was years ago. With the enchilada sauce, once I had a grip on the ‘common’ version of it, the sauce we’re all use to, the sauce that in this metaphor represents ‘The norm’, or the baseline, I began experimenting. I started with the chiles themselves. Chili powder, or any powdered ingredient, totally blows. Garlic powder, onion powder, chili powder, paprika, all them contain an aluminum based anti-clumping agent. It irritates my stomach a little, probably yours too. So I started there. Dried anchoes, dried Californias and New Mexicos, rehydrated, were a good start. It got more complicated. Better, then worse, then just different, then better and different. Time passed. Eventually, my very own recipe emerged, an enchilada sauce like no one else’s. Mine. Tailored to my taste. I just made it and not only is it good, but in some ways it’s just like my life. Yours too, probably. Time, continuous effort to evolve into something better than the baseline, and voila. A highly customized human mind is just like a dramatically evolved enchilada sauce. Here in the time of the Great Sabbatical, I hope you’re all working on something tasty. If you aren’t, you can still start right now. These are dark, shitty times, and maybe the world (America anyway) really is headed for the Republican Hell and the best the 99% can hope for is a leaky FEMA trailer and a boot on the neck, but you don’t have to go with that plan, do you? Fuck that. Feed your notion of individuality, unpopular as that is right now. Here’s my enchilada sauce recipe, give it a whirl and maybe you’ll see something.

In medium sauce pan-

Toast 1 teaspoon cumin seeds

When browned, add 2 tablespoons (or so) of olive oil, frying the toasted seeds.

Let cool (you now have 2 tablespoons of toasted cumin seed oil), add-

5 ancho chiles, deseeded (also remove the white tissue)

2 California chiles, deseeded (the seeds and the white tissue are the hot ingredients)

5 cloves crushed, peeled garlic

1 and ½ cup water

Some black pepper, ground right there

Heat to boil, cover, turn heat off

Let sit for 15 minutes, blend, salt to taste

It is dark, dark red. Thick. Sweet. Smoky. You can also use this as a substitute for The Sauce of Lust and Violence to baste a chicken. See Green Chili Stuffing Roasted Chicken for instructions.

Alive- A Zombie Movie Review

We begin with the protagonist Oh Jun-U, a bleach blond Korean mama’s boy, waking late, briefly fucking with a video game, and then boom! Straight to the zombie mayhem. Elapsed time- less than three minutes. These are also turbo zombies, fast, flailing, bitey bitey kill kill, purely disco. Doucheboy watches the horror outside from the vantage of his 5th floor balcony. Oh no! His dipshit neighbor pal shows up freaking out! He wants to take a DUMP? Wha… He goes into the bathroom, there’s screaming outside, the TV says cannibals are swarming outside like mofos and watch for bites, those wads are infectimundo. Bro bro comes out of the crapper, does the cracking tweaker bone yoga contortions made famous in KINGDOM, and charges in for the bite! Mama’s boy repels him and chases him into the hall! ANOTHER turbo zombie, this one fat, kills the new bro zombie! The irony!

Roll opening credits.

Initially, the Dream of Fire is slow to awaken in Oh Jun-U’s nads. Kill or be killed does not become a clear thing for him as soon as it would for some boys and girls. He learns quickly after a zombie trashes his place and his mom or the maid isn’t there to clean that shit up but it’s not quite enough. He cries a little at one point because he misses mommy and you kinda hope a gnarly rescue fighter swoops in and steals his shit right then, someone who might be trying to save people instead of hiding. Maybe one of the dudes from the Korean metal band Tokkaibe, fresh from slaughter and thirsty for beer and a piece of dumbass. Finally, Jun loses his shit and goes a little crazy. Bit by bit, baby step by boo boo wiggle, he’s getting there. But in the end only one thing will spur him to apocalypse greatness and we can see it coming a mile away. The human zest for the timeless combination of booze and pussy is what separates homo sapien males from the other primates and when, partially loaded, Jun boy catches a distant whiff of poon on the wind, the dormant Beyond Thunderdome psycho appropriate for the situation rises in his mental landscape, pushing aside his pitiful Zoomer inner child. There is truth here. The desire to get some is one of the great drivers of our species and we all know it. The almost-but-not-quite saucy Kim Yu-Bin is the only game in town but… we feel sorry for her medium fine ass right away. Jun is the only game in town for her too and she deserves just a little better, if only to make this more interesting. Not a Brad Pittcock Ken Doll but a sort of… mmm, maybe one of the dudes from the Korean death metal band Kalpa. A dude who can get down and do some man shit, like behead the undead but also run a bubble bath for her as a prelude to serious nasty. I’m just saying. This is a movie review. I’m not shooting for a Pulitzer.

Director Cho Il-Hyung does not rise to the top, or even the middle, with this predictable, not very creepy, not very original, slightly sappy K-Zom. The lead is a dip, the hot chick is so so, the bla bla bla. Unique to Korean zombie flicks is the screwball lead, it seems. Train To Busan was a far better movie in every way, but the lead there was a rich brobot douche we wanted to die from scene one. Alive’s protagonist is a dullard mamma’s boy and there are times when we wish he just fell off his balcony, the sparkless love interest vanished, and the cameras turned toward more interesting characters who were doing something. Anything else. On a scale of one to five skulls, zero skulls being Michelle Morgan’s suicide awful It Happened In L.A. (perhaps the worst movie in decades) and Bladerunner being a Five Skulls with Fire, I give this wimpy wag One Skull.

2002 City of God- a movie review (now on HBO)

I can’t say exactly why this movie resonates with me again and again, but I can speculate that the resonance illustrates the difference between consuming and metabolizing. We all know those epic readers who can wax on and on about a given author, the books publisher, the clinical details of the protagonist’s dilemma, but somehow never seem to actually learn anything personal, as in experience personal growth, from words. Alternately, there are also readers who can be ennobled and enriched, even transformed, by a Spider Man comic book. Movies are the same way and the viewing audience subject to the same processes. When you watch something like City of God and you see slums, horror, desperation, the cycles of poverty and violence and death, maybe consider walking into it a little deeper. You may not like it, but a ghostly version of you, dear reader, might be in that movie too. The reason I can’t say exactly why this movie resonated with me is possibly because I’m lost in there somewhere every time. This movie isn’t a Marvel sippy cup of sugar water or a plastic flute of champagne or even a bathtub full of flat beer. It’s an ocean filled with life. The performances by this astonishing cast of actors are transcendent- and they weren’t even ‘real’ actors (cue the endless jokes about the standard issue Hollywood Botox jizz toilets and the BradBiff Pittcocks, all so very ‘real’ themselves), they were favela residents. They were magnificent and the realness made it personal. Maybe that was it. It was based on the novel Cidade de Dius by Paolo Lins and for me that usually makes a movie more complex and immersive and palatable, so that certainly helped. But all that is the x and y part of the equation. Let’s look to the right of the = sign and see what happened.

Bullshit scoffs the hollow, piss puddle deep cynic. No one can learn from that film. I don’t want to look at your post metabolism notes on this! You aren’t Brazilian, you aren’t black, your aren’t bla bla bla yawn… Intriguing, considers the metabolic. My gustation- For me, some of the most pleasant periods of my life were the simple ones. I woke, I did something menial or sketchy or both, found some basic food, laughed, struggled mightily and at times didn’t, and there was some echo of the savanna in that. There was looking, hunting, hiding, the chase and being chased, gathering, foraging… simplicity. The simplicity that comes with being what many Americans call ‘poor’ but is in many instances the state one lives in when they aren’t inspired by the conventions of ambition and the needless baggage any success there would entail. That is a commonality I felt. It seemed like, for a time, I was doing what I was designed to do, what 300,000 years of human evolutionary history prepared me for. There was some fucking, but it was never complicated. I occasionally hit shitty people, but mostly I tried not to. Sometimes I was hungry, but tomorrow was always another day. The sun circled the Earth. The moon came and went. The wind flowed around stationary objects. In City of God, I saw in the strangers from a different place something tangible. It stretched across the cultural gap and used elements of my own personae as a lens. And that, dear reader, is the name of the game in art, and art, dear reader, is a concept too easily ignored in film these days. 500 years from now City of God will be one of the only films of 2002. Box office hits that same year include, drum roll, Sweet Home Alabama and The Santa Clause 2. They won’t be on any list the historians of tomorrow will make, and ‘art’ is precisely why.

A great book can make you more human than you might be, if you metabolize it. A great movie can too. As I watched City of God, now on HBO, I realized that I learned something different from it every time. This time, it gave context to some of my own experiences and brought back distant memories with great clarity. Next time I watch this movie I feel certain I’ll learn and feel something else. I give 2002 City of God, Cidade de Dius, by directors Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund, Five Skulls, the highest possible rating, and I look forward to watching it again somewhere down my entropic process.

The End Of Your Story Is More Important Than Ever

Gun battle with crooked cops in a whorehouse. That’s how I always pictured the end- smoke, shrieking hookers with big hair tear assing through terrible mayhem as I bring the hammer down on their wicked overlords. Flames, explosions, splattering fountains of red, and in the center one bent old man with two heavy six shooters blazing away in a final symbolic act- we are all whores with crooked overlords. I can still see this future. My suit is too big because I’ve been shrinking like old men do. My hands are gnarled and the last cigarette is no cigarette at all, but a cigar, one of those thin ones. I can taste the cheap whiskey. All the sound is muted because I threw away my hearing aid and I’m firing, firing, and then… A bright light! Blinding white! And then an antiquated telephone busy signal that fades…

That won’t happen. At 50 I know what will though and I’m 100% certain of it. The current end of life model for Americans is to live as long as you can outside the system, but eventually if you live long enough you’ll be forced into an old folks home until all of your financial resources are exhausted and then you’re transferred to the wards where you die an institutional death, drained and broke, a final, drugged morsel for the machine, consumed entirely. I’ll go for the gun battle whorehouse thing before anything as terrible as that, but what else is there? What is the end I predict now, here at the beginning of my 5th decade? What are the final pages in the last chapter of Jeff Johnson…

I’ll die in a stylish French prison. I just know it. Stone walls, no computers, guards with outdated uniforms. Still a prison, sure, but not the humiliating American death ward/final robbery variety. My brother will be there. We’ll play checkers. He’s mouthy, and as an old man he’ll lie almost constantly, so I’ll have a shank at the ready to keep the other cons from drowning him in a toilet. And I can see that life clearly- its winter and we play checkers outside in a courtyard with high granite walls. My sweater is gray and big, threadbare and comfortable. Every afternoon we get a tin bowl of white beans with a little sausage and a chunk of coarse rye bread with mustard. Someone has rum and we drink a little of that every day after dinner. My brother is older and he sleeps more, so after he climbs in his bunk I play poker with Pierre and Ernesto, sometimes late into the night if they have any of that rough red wine, and when the sky is clear I watch the satellites and the new activity transforming the moon. I can feel that cold night wind on my upturned eyes right now.

I think about this from time to time, not too often, but this morning it came up when a friend of mine, a first rate thinker in my opinion, told me about his end of life vision. It was so depressing, so empty and crapulent that I realized it undoubtedly colored his present in some way. Just as my vision colors mine. So this is my Sunday morning revelation- think of a good end to your story. If all you can envision is a bad one, as in stale, shitty and depressing, try harder because your story sucks.

Arkansas- A Movie Review

5 skulls, the highest possible rating. A flowing, gritty, comical masterpiece. I could barely believe I was watching this flick, easily the best thing streaming so far in 2020. I didn’t know a fucking thing about this movie when I clicked on it this morning. Seemed like an okay way to spend a Saturday morning. I worked my ass off this week (I’m typing again, something I swore not to do until Monday, yet another testament to this film’s greatness) and I wanted to be entertained without looking at WORDS. No reading, no writing of course, just brain damaged television bliss. Movies are often disappointing, television almost always so, and I had low expectations.

Witty dialogue. Actually wise at times and keenly observant. I began to suspect that the makers of this flick had cherry picked a novel for dialogue (they did! Arkansas by John Brandon, published by those obnoxious fuckers at McSweeney’s) and the structure was a tad too complex but sound at the same time, also novelesque. And then there was the little dude with the moustache playing the drug dealer opposite Liam Hemsworth. For a dumpy little fella I’d never seen in anything he was good. A little too good. In fact, he was so good that it seemed like he might be interesting in real life. That good. And it turns out he is! Said dumpy guy, and you will begin to suspect his genius just by watching the way he plays his own face, is also the director! And the screenwriter sharing credit with a nobody named Andrew Boonkrong (I predict greatness from this former nobody) and, you guessed it, John Brandon. Said genius is Clark Duke.

There is art in this movie. Visually. There are formulas in every artistic medium. Periods. Ages, eras, camps, disciplines, bla bla bla. So often in anything as commercial as a movie on Amazon the art is subtle. A consistently ‘off center’ mood, a ‘feel’ with rock solid follow through, is almost always achieved by accident, and it happens all the fucking time. Actually manipulating this is… well. You have to see it to believe it. Hats off to Clark Duke. I get the feeling this guy could do almost anything, but there he is, writing, acting, and directing Arkansas. Fantastic performances by Liam Hemsworth, a great, great Vince Vaughn (yes it is possible), John Malkovich, Michael Kenneth Williams, Vivica A. Fox, and more, and a sweet, blistering soundtrack by THE FLAMING LIPS!

Tattooing, The Mask, And THE CODE

Here’s a story about life, death and commerce. People may wonder why I’m so adamant on social media when it comes to wearing a mask- is it for the common good? Is it personal responsibility over ‘personal freedom’? It is, but it’s also because about 70% of my social media world is comprised of tattoo people. Tattooers, tattoo artists, artist who tattoo as their day job, whatever. They work in that field. And many of them are with me on this. Protect the weak and the old, wear the mask, stop transmission, your ignorant confederate psychic powers cannot tell you if you’re a carrier so assume you are, etcetera. But some of you motherfuckers are not, so here’s a story for your ignorant asses.

Once, before your time, AIDS became something more than a ‘gay’ disease. It became a general population disease. You could get it on a Friday night kind of disease. And right on top of it, Hep C went from a ‘junkie’ disease to, you guessed it, a general population disease. And right then the tattoo world found itself under a magnifying glass. This is an industry with no leaders, but right then EVERYONE knew what had to happen. We had to educate ourselves so we could convince the general population, the customers, that we weren’t going to kill them. AND WE DID.

That ushered in the greatest period of prosperity tattooing has ever known. The late 90’s. And it happened right when general paranoia was at an all time high. This is THE CODE I’m referring to. And what do I see right now? A handful of self-righteous shitheads violating this all important rule. Do the math, dildo. If even 20% of your local customer base understands the concept of cross contamination and your perilous ignorance of it, they will doubt you. And that doubt is just as contagious as a virus. So you, loudmouth with civil rights, are not only fucking yourself up but you are fucking up the painstaking work of the hard working motherfuckers who came before you. And you need your fucking thumbs broken.

Knowledge comes in cycles. Tattooing is, for instance, a low resolution medium. It takes seven years to figure this out. Right now we’re in year five of one of these cycles. I’ve seen it before and I’ll see it again. The noodly detail in thousands of pieces will blur together. And who cares. The pens- they don’t seem to pack pigment. Will this technology stand the test of seven years? I think it still needs work, but that’s just me. But there is no cycle when it comes to maintaining the public trust. There is no margin for experimentation. There is no room for error. There is no room for anything. You toe the line. You keep the trust. You will be the most germ-conscious person in the room unless you’re actually in the hospital. And if you don’t maintain this trust? The wrong kind of people are watching. People like me.

Tropic of Cancer and The Background

‘I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed.’ I first read these lines in a seriously shitty hotel in Fez, Morocco. In the heat of the day I’d gone wandering around, at a time in the afternoon when the city was safe enough, and I found a little bookstore I’d read about in some passing traveler’s guidebook. I was crestfallen when I discovered it was just a basket in front of a dark, seemingly closed place. I was 18. I wanted to read science fiction or maybe a mystery, but not one of the tattered John Grisham (Jesus that guy sucks) paperbacks or worse, a corny soft porn bodice ripper. The ancient basket attendant was eager to make a sale, so in a last ditch effort he indicated that I should enter the shop he sat in front of, though he cautioned me with ‘old, no good’ and a sour face. I went in.

            I didn’t know as much about books as I do now. There was a fortune in that place, but I also didn’t want to linger. As luck would have it, I’d brought along a massive tome of Norman Mailer essays, thinking I’d torture myself into reading them, and even though I’d lost the heavy book weeks before it was in there that I read about Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller and the Odalisque Press. I couldn’t believe it, but there, right in front of me after less than sixty seconds of browsing, was a copy of Tropic of Cancer. I took it out, cracked it open, saw the publisher, and bought it for the equivalent of maybe a dime.

            I think about it sometimes. It seems, all these years later, that where you read a book matters in terms of lasting impact. My older brother later stole that book, but all these years later it strikes me as the same as stealing a photograph. No one can steal the memory itself. Which brings me to my point. People are doing some extra reading right now. You’re reading this blog! But your book, the paperback beside your bed or next to your chair in the living room. Take that book on a trip (wear your mask) and see what happens. I know it sounds strange, but the memory of that novel can attach itself to your memories of world around it while the book is in your hands. And that’s a very fine thing. I think of Tania, O Tania and her wrinkles and snap! Just like that I can hear the echo of a different place and see in my mind a different sky.