the case for starvation

Opening your own business can do wonders for your perspective. It's effect on my financial perspective was fully expected. Doing so in the midst of a national recession, all the more so. Being prepared, mentally, is one thing. In practice it has effected me well beyond my wallet. I'm not talking about the obvious responsibilities and perks of being my own boss. That part is fine. Its great and its one of the main attractions to having embarked on this trip.
The shop I left behind was a busy shop. Well established after more than a decade of service, it was a popular and heavily patronized business. I made a lot of money there. It was the kind of atmosphere where I could pretty much name my price. Customers would sign up without a blink of hesitation. The issues I had were centered on management, not on the clients. It was an issue of work ethic, of differences in moral code and lack of compassion. Compassion for customers as well as employees. I spent several years there. Many more years than I would have had there not been as much money involved. I made a deliberate and conscious compromise. I stopped painting, and the years passed. I bought lots of neat stuff.
This type of thing effects a man. It is impossible not to take that kind of thing for granted to some extent. I did the best I could to not do so, and I honestly think I did pretty well, considering. Having said that: it still seeps into you. It can't be stopped. Any artist can attest to it: success and money can and does compromise your passion. Some might say it can kill it. There's a time when I'd have argued about that. Especially when my pockets were the fattest.
Today I am broke. This is no simple figure of speech. As the great old country song puts it: I'm busted. I do a handful of tattoos a week. The bills pile up, and get paid on a priority basis. I eat lots of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I sold my 4x4 truck for a small, gas efficient 4 cylinder. I've given much of my superfluous stuff away, and have sold most of my furniture on Craiglist for mortgage money. I buy beer in cans and drink my cocktails at home. I don't eat out much any more.
I am also drawing and painting more than I ever have in my life. I make weekly trips to art supply stores and pay for watercolor paper by the individual sheet, and I pay for it with dollar bills. I paint nearly every day. My tattooing has never been more deliberate and refined. I put every grain of effort and passion into every tiny butterfly or kanji tattoo I get. I love tattooing for the first time in years. I love painting again. I just might feel more alive than I ever have.

"it's one of my faults that I can't quell my past" -aimee mann-fourth of july

About a year and a half ago I began throwing things away. For most of my life I've had a hard time separating myself from objects. I develop sentimental attachments to things. From t-shirts to ticket stubs, letters received in the mail, notes written on small bits of paper by friends or lovers I've not seen in decades. Everything has gone into a box at some point. When the box is full it gets taped up and shoved into a closet or onto a shelf. The worst part of this habit manifests itself whenever I move into a new location. Any well intentioned friend who volunteers to help is left unwittingly carrying hundreds of pounds of history. Up and down stairs. Onto moving trucks. Into basements and attics. Some of these boxes will go ten or more years remaining unopened. Their content largely unknown even to me.
My city-issued plastic garbage can is about two and a half times larger than the traditional steel garbage can that most of us grew up with. In the last year I have filled it fifteen to twenty times. Over-flowing. What has not been deemed useless has been donated to goodwill. I've filled the back of my pickup truck six to eight times with donations. Large black garbage bags filled with t-shirts, coats, shoes and pants. Boxes filled with stereo components, kitchen appliances, books, statues and trinkets. There has been furniture. Magazine collections. Dishware. Some of these boxes had contents I'd not opened to sunlight in more than fifteen years.
The first few boxes were the most painful. Nearly each item revealed its significance to me immediately, just as I'd intended it to do. The person who gave it to me. The place I lived. The job I had. The smells of my environment. The faces of those around me. Just as I'd hoped each item would. Often their magic more potent than I had even imagined.
Separating myself from each item became a little easier each time it left my hand. Now the ritual itself has become joyful. I actually anticipate each session. This process, though it sounds massively productive already, is not yet finished. I've carried the full and literal weight of my history for nearly my entire life. There are many more boxes. There is much yet to reveal, and much yet to be loosened from my desperate grasp.

I've begun attending open meditation on Wednesday nights. I've found a meditation center, here in the city. It's a simple, modern and unassuming looking building located in the middle of a residential block. Inside the entrance a small hallway leads into and open room. Windows line the left and right sides from floor to ceiling. Just before the session begins, the care-taker of the building opens these windows, and the air inside slowly acclimates to the outside climate. At the front of the room is a low platform, maybe six or eight inches elevated from the floor. A table stands in the center. On this is a simple shrine. Several small bowls are lined up on this table, and the attendant fills these, very deliberately, with water from a pitcher. The room itself is very sparsely decorated. The center of the room is lined with meditation cushions. These are dark blue, and there seems to be about three variations in sizes and shapes. This, I am told is to accommodate individual preferences and physical needs of those meditating.
As I sit in meditation the sounds of the neighborhood slowly begin to enter the room. Cars cruising slowly past. The indecipherable conversations of pedestrians passing on the sidewalk. Dogs barking.
On my first night the sounds of a circular saw, maybe half a block away, repeated in no particular pattern during my time there. Sawing. Hammering for a while. Sawing again. Bombing into the room above the sounds of people and birds and cars. I was struck, even during my meditation, by the realization that I was not annoyed by this interruption of mechanized industrial noise. Of dogs barking. Cars. Birds. There are settings in which these same sounds would drive me crazy. In a different context, like when I'm trying to sleep. Working. Watching tv. I was amazed to find them not unpleasant at all. They were simply just there. Neither good nor bad. Just elements in my current, unchangeable environment. Part of the experience of being me in that moment in time.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche compares life to driving along in a car. When we meditate, we are simply pulling the car to the shoulder, getting out, and standing there in the road. Taking in the scenery around us, the weather, the car, the road, our bodies. No judgment of these things. Just observation. I like this. I can get my head around it. It makes me think of every roadside pull-out, all over the United States, that I've ever been drawn to. I almost never pass one up. Sometimes I'll spend a few moments, leaving the car running. Sometimes I might stay for an hour or more. Absorbing that space.

this is why we are here

To say that I'm a Buddhist would be jumping the gun. I stumble into Buddhist imagery fairly often in my work. Esthetically it's undeniably powerful. How often the folks getting this imagery are actually practicing Buddhists themselves, I could not say. It's not uncommon at all to put images on people who are more jazzed about how a thing looks, than the associated belief system behind it. I make a good living putting crosses on non-practicing Christians.
I've begun exploring the Buddha deeper after having seen a very good documentary film on cable recently. That sounds terribly lame to admit out loud, but there it is. The greatest impact of the film was in the realization that everything I thought I knew about Buddha was nothing but a series of complete misconceptions. I learned that the Buddha was an actual man. That he, too, had to contend with his own mortal human condition every day of his life. I had perceived him as possessing super powers, and assumed that he was not born of this world. I guess I believed he was just another god. Not here. Not among us. Not weak and alive and human.
It is in this realization that I've come to desire more information. I've begun to ask questions. The hunger for information is one of my favorite desires. I don't feel it all the time. Sometimes it's just way easier to not know.
This is the reason for starting this blog. It is intended to be a chronicle of my attempt to make something legible out of the answers.

my hands

I've been tattooing for 14 years. During this time, my hands have spent the better part of each work day wrapped in latex gloves. I use the term "latex gloves" out of habit, having actually switched to non-latex gloves many years ago. I've seen the results of latex allergies having developed in several peers, and have no interest in traveling down that road. Latex allergies are untreatable. They only get worse. Eventually even things like underwear waistbands and latex condoms become irritants. This sounds horrifying to me. I never go without underwear. Feels far too savage for my tastes. The thought of a life without condoms terrifies me to no end. Many great joys have found inspiration in comfortable underwear, and come to fruition in condoms. I'll pay the extra money for non-latex, nitrile gloves, and will smile as I empty my wallet in doing so.
The side effect of my digits spending so much time contained in these gloves is evident in my tender, lily white hands. They are smooth and pale. Soft. Almost feminine. These are most decidedly not the hands of my father, who worked in the auto body industry for more than 30 years. His hands were like leather gloves. Rough, craggy. Cracked and calloused. He could grip a piece of hot steel and not feel the pain that would send most men screeching.
I love welding. I love fighting with and fabricating old rusted steel. I build traditional, 1950's styled hot rods when I'm not at the shop. I spend a lot of my weekend time in the garage doing this. The reality of it all, however, is that I spend far more time wearing latex gloves than not. Because of this, my tender, perfect hands endure my weekends by shredding and tearing apart. Grinding sparks, hot weld spatter, sandpaper and hammer blows leave my fingers and knuckles bloodied by Monday. At the tattoo shop, protected again in the gloves, they recover. By Friday, nearly healed, I'm back into the garage to beat my hands apart again. During the week at work, I look over my hands and fingers, and recall what things I accomplished in the garage the previous weekend. The challenges of stubborn metal. The small victories, and occasional great failures. These things bring me no financial gain. No glory. They have nothing to do with my day to day work whatsoever. Done for no other reason than to see if I could do it. To see if I had it in me to master the skills required for the task at hand. Breathing new life into forgotten old steel.