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.