Something’s Brewin’

A rennaissance is afoot!  (And I never use exclamation marks, so this really must be exciting.)

Residual.Ink is being reinvented.  No longer merely a blog, residual.ink will soon be a full-blown website complete with Twitter, RSS feeds, maps, links, photos, and even a fancy new logo designed by Mark Fleming.  More details on the content and bent of the website will be available when I’m good’n ready.

So I officially own the rights to www.residual-ink.com, which immediately imparts an overblown sense of self-importance, despite the fact that it’s a blank web-page so far.  The site is currently under development, and might take a while (while I spend nights huddled squinting over my laptop trying to decipher the vagaries of HTML and CSS).  But it’s my new project, and I’m pretty stoked about it.

But for now…get lost.

In the Long Run

If I went to sleep now I could wake up at 10, rested with plenty of sleep.  But I’m already dressed so I’ll run instead.  Run for a half hour or so.  When I get back, once I’ve fished my keys from the loam under the hedge outside—I hate holding things when I run—I’ll climb the four flights back up here and stretch.  Sprawl out letting my sweat seep into the carpet stretching and maybe some pushups too.  Stray kernels of kitty-litter embedded in my back and palms.  By the time I find my way to the shower it’ll be around six.

When I have the apartment to myself my showers tend to be epic; we have steady pressure and a reliable boiler and, uncontested in the wee hours of the morning, I’ll let the water beat on my back until I’m red and wrinkled.  I do my most productive thinking breathing steam, with hot cheeks and dripping eyes and the skin between my shoulderblades hammered numb by scalding water.

Once I fell asleep in the shower.  Jolted when my knees buckled, awake.  Scrambling.  My panic arm shot up to stop the fall, hand clamped fast over my roommate’s razor jutting from the basket under the showerhead.  After an hour of pressurized wet heat your skin cuts like custard.  And those four-blades-for-an-extra-close-shave even work on fingerpads.  Who knew.  Blood flows fast after a long run.

Astride the Horizon (been reading too much Joyce)

Only my Fear moves, nagging and tossing her mane, impatient as my rifle and just as idle.  Steelcold in these unsunny doldrums where all is waiting and muffled under the silence of rainless clouds.  Everything here is latent, here where fruition is foreign as fine, flowing silk, consummation an exotic and intoxicating spice transported by caravan.

I long for salt.  I yearn for its twisting darkeyed blossom on the mountainous crags of my tongue.  Something to staunch the deadrot festering in my mouth, closed here and silent so long.  With a cup I would drink up the sea.  Drink it and escape this island, I would saddle my horse whose name is Fear and ride her through the Nubian depths of dry ocean.  Continents rising sphinxes in our wake.

But I am cupless and my tongue is parched, lolling.  Here with sand in my throat perched on the horizon itself, my thin line.  I toe it, and tow it.  Wrap it around my hand and pull my weight.  It constricts, my fleshy palm ballooning, purpling, bursting.  This is my lifeline, so long, a rivulet of blood.  The horizon is my lifeline and it runs with blood from my hands, from my work.  The horizon is my essence and I cannot reach it, cannot escape it.  Maddening.  The horizon is round and it encircles me and my Fear bucks and whinnies, clops hoofs on the dry sandy shores of nowhere.  Nowhere.  Now here.  Here and now.  He ran down.  Down to the sea and drowned.  His fleshtaste spoils the ocean and thus my nepenthe.  Sanguinary salt.  My Fear is thirsty.

A warmth stirs.  Idle no longer.  Still, bloodcold.

So(me)times

Sometimes I think I’m trying too hard.  Then, on reflection, I generally conclude that I wasn’t trying hard enough.  Sometimes I feel like I need to think less about my writing and it will just flow, and be better for it.  Then nothing comes, so I force something out and it’s overwrought and fake.  Either way it’s worthless.  Overly sentimental and verbally sobbing, or devoid of feeling and transparent–either too dramatic or too cynical to be taken seriously.  So I take a legal pad and hole up in a coffee shop and try to motivate myself with Lists and Plans and Grand Ideas.  But they all involve going away and I’m still here.

So I crumple my motivational bullshit into a ball and leave it on the counter at the coffee shop and walk home, full of self-loathing and caffeine–neither of which helps anymore.  I fall on my bed and stare at my walls which are maps and I wonder if I’ll ever go there, or there, follow the lines I’ve traced and sketched and dreamt.  Wonder if leaving will change me in the way I hope.  The way I need.  Or maybe leaving will just leave me staring at a different set of walls.  I write things like this in here because I have that itching feeling where I can’t reach, that feeling that nobody understands.  The one everybody understands.  Everyone is here and we all pretend we’re the only one because that would make it okay.  That awful shame dug out of your diaphragm with a malicious spade, the one that renders you incapable of eye-contact in the mirror.  Our knuckles are whiterimmed from squeezing that spade handle so hard.

This, too, is a gleaming example of the grotesque cycle I just described.  It’s telling you that I’m self-aware, cognisant of my own misgivings.  That I understand the secrets beneath the surface, and therefore I really must be different.  Really, because I’m on to it.  I understand that mysterious clockwork that makes us all stifle in the humid, thickwoven weight of our own thoughts.  Do you see it now?  How the same we are?

But it never works because nobody can be the same, because if we’re all the same then we’re all pointless like tunafish.  Has anybody ever loved a tunafish?  Everyone wants to set themselves apart with the martyrdom of their existence, because nobody wants to know their own insignificance.  Like fish in a can, dated and dented on a shelf.  They set themselves on a pedestal with their unique inner turmoil which is the same inner turmoil that thousands of millions have lamented before.  And striving to explain it here, it’s just my own attempt to set myself apart as some omniscient pedagog, sharing my wisdom with the ignorant fish-masses.  So it’s all pointless and I’m just a slightly bigger asshole than you are because I put it on the internet.

Tunafish?  I think I must be trying too hard.

Pragmatism

The skin in the fold between my littlest right toe and the ball of my foot has been itchy and dry for the past few weeks.  Product of sixty hours a week in leather shoes, I imagine.  Yesterday it split into a vital deep chasm, so deep that when I peel the edges back I can see the pulsing metropolis of my cardiovascular system going about it’s throbbing business, surging along, totally unaware of my existence.

Got Ink?

When getting a tattoo, it’s best to leave your leather jacket at home.  Just drape it casually over the bedpost along with your layered graphic tees and that deliberate, jaunty way you tie the scarf you wear all year.  Actually, go ahead and forget about your image altogether, because the second you step over the threshhold of a tattoo parlor, you are no longer cool.

Let’s start at the beginning: you’ve decided you want a tattoo.  Why?  You want a tattoo because you think they’re cool.  Don’t argue.  Don’t fuss.  It isn’t worth the trouble, because there is absolutely no reason to get a tattoo other than to enhance your image, and nobody bothers enhancing something they found satisfactory in the first place.  Please understand, my position is one of the deepest empathy (I have three tattoos and counting), so we might as well be honest.  You want a tattoo because you think they’re cool, and having one will make you cool.

Even the worst tattoos have a certain badass appeal.  Like piercings, they entail a modicum of masochism, a willingness to suffer towards a goal;  everyone knows chicks dig scars.  Because scars mean pain, and guys who have endured pain are tough.  Bad ass.  Also, unlike piercings, tattoos are permanent.  Yes, I know there are laser treatments, but those are prohibitively expensive, excruciatingly painful, and really only remove a tattoo enough to have it covered by another tattoo.  So tattoos require commitment.  Pain and commitment…basically, tattoos are like marriage, hence the initial appeal.  Followed by the festering distaste and ultimate regret that comes with age and maturity, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

And yes, I know there are commemorative tattoos: people getting inked in memory of a lost child, lover, pet, or parent.  But–call me heartless–these people are no less image-conscious than the rest.  There are countless ways to memorialize a loved one, but a tattoo is the only one that leaves the recipient looking eternally melancholy, signifying the deep ocean of noble angst underneath his or her evermarked skin.  Woe is you.  Whatever.  Commemorative tattoos are nothing but a way to permanently attach one’s heart to one’s sleeve, a public cry for sympathy, and there’s nothing touching or sentimental about that.

Anyway.  You want a tattoo.  So what to get?  Do you pick something meaningful, or purely aesthetic?  There are a couple of things to remember here.  First, a tattoo’s personal meaning will most likely be lost on anyone who looks at it, or require a lengthy and cumbersome explanation.  And if it doesn’t require an explanation, then the meaning is blatant, which means you’re advertising your personal bullshit on your body again, so you might as well just get “NOTICE ME, I’M SPECIAL” tattooed on your forehead.

Second, there’s the purely visual tattoo.  This one’s double-edged.  On the one hand, getting a big tribal piece that contours to the muscles on your back and shoulders makes you look pretty sexy.  On the other hand, it makes you look like a big, shallow, superficial fucking moron.  However, if that’s the first tattoo idea that jumps into your head, you’re probably devoid of any nerdy mental detreitus like self-awareness or a capacity for introspection beyond “Does this show off my (insert muscle group) to advantage?”  So it probably won’t bother you much, if it occurs to you at all.  Frankly, I have more respect for this type of tattoo than the first, because at least they’re not pretending to be anything they’re not.

Alright, so you’ve picked your piece.  Now, where to put it?  This requires at least as much thought as what to get in the first place, and honestly I think the two decisions should go hand in hand.  There are a lot of considerations.  Visibility is one.  I’m a bartender with aspirations to travel and write for money, and have decided that business deals and three-piece suits are not in my future.  So the compass rose tattoo on the back of my neck is never going to cost me more than the smug approval of a few philistine fuckbags I could give a rat’s ass about anyway.  That said, my lifestyle isn’t for everyone.  You want to be a lawyer?  Keep them under your shirt.  A teacher?  Same deal.  Nobody’s going to hire Ms. Thompson to teach the third grade if she’s got a dragon sucking a unicorn’s blood on her forearm.  I would, however, give Ms. Thompson one hell of a recommendation, because chicks with tattoos are really, really hot.

So occupation is one thing to consider, another is pain.  Tattoos hurt.  You see them on TV and the artist is chatting up the customer and everyone’s smiling or really somber, depending on the moral this particular episode is striving lamely toward, but they never show the wincing.  They don’t show the three-hours-cocked-in-the-same-position sweating-out-your-ass discomfort.  Tattoos are no picnic no matter where you put them, but in the right spot (ribs, collar, joints, neck, feet, hands, sides), they’re absolute torture.  And once you start, you can’t just erase.  There’s no “Just kidding, this really isn’t for me.”  Those three little lines that would’ve been the lyrics to your favorite song will forever remind you what a stupid pussy you were at nineteen.

And don’t forget the classic tattoo caveat–age.  There will come a time, no matter how many Wheaties you scarf in your youth, that your skin will wither.  You will get wrinkly and old, inching slowly and irrevocably toward decrepitude, and your tattoos will age with you.  The body part they cover, once so strong and supple, will begin to sag.  Hair will sprout from odd places.  And that sexy tribal back-piece will look pretty sad underneath a hospital gown.  This is the classic, “sensible” tattoo deterrent, and it’s a difficult one to refute.  My only advice is that you might also get whacked by a bus or a falling piano this afternoon, so a certain element of living in the moment is never a bad thing.  And however people may judge you in old age, they’ll know that you lived a vigorous, spontaneous youth.  More importantly, you’ll know.

Moving on.  Piece–Check.  Placement–Check.  Tattoo parlor?  Artist?  This part isn’t actually so hard.  Just talk to people.  Researching online is a good idea, but you won’t learn much.  Shops aren’t going to market themselves as unsafe or not particularly concerned with hygiene.  They won’t bill their artists as amateurs three weeks out of apprenticeship who can only do Latin lettering.  They’re going to say they’re a “vibrant new addition to the team with a new take on classic American-style tattoos and roots in traditional Japanese imagery, having apprenticed in LA and Weschester, UK.  Totally Rad!”  Seriously, talk to people who have tattoos.

Finally, it’s time to set up an appointment.  You could call, but your best bet is going in person.  Check the hours of operation and go in within the first couple hours of opening.  Generally speaking, tattoo artists aren’t nine-to-fivers, and neither are their clients.  12 to 9 pm, Tuesday-Saturday are typical shop hours.  You want to go early in hopes of talking to an actual artist before they’re booked up and busy.  Otherwise, you’re stuck with the art student they’ve got picking her tongue ring at the register and selling T-shirts.  You can discuss your idea, get a price-range, and set up an appointment.  Ah, and that’s important too.

Discuss!  You’ve never been tattooed, you don’t know a thing about tattoos other than how they look.  You are clueless as to the mechanics of rendering an image and permanently embedding it in human flesh.  So if an artist tells you something is going to look better this way, do it their way.  Or find a workable middle ground.  Do not go in with an ironclad concept, because you will either leave with a shitty tattoo from an annoyed artist, or you’ll get turned away completely.  Remember, you’re dealing with professional artists; the more freedom you give them, the better your tattoo is likely to be.

Cost is something to keep in mind, too, as tattoos are not cheap.  Typically there is a base price for all images, regardless of size ($50 or $75 is standard), then the artist will either charge by the hour or, for larger pieces, negotiate a price up front.  Paying $500 for a tattoo is not uncommon.  You will not get a 6×8 Koi fish on your ribcage for $100.  It’s good to have a realistic notion of what you’re getting into.  Shop around.  Shops in the middle of New York will be more expensive than a shop in the middle of nowhere.  However, a high-volume urban shop will also attract more skilled artists.  Cost versus product is a choice you’re going to have to make.  It’s your body.

Furthermore, the more skilled an artist is, the longer you’re going to have to wait.  Most places have a day designated to walk-ins.  Predominantly Saturdays.  But the top artists will not be taking walk-ins.  They will be by appointment only, six-months in advance, ridiculously expensive, and totally worth the investment for an especially large or intricate piece.  But if you’re just getting “MOM” on your bicep, there are plenty of worthy, mortal artists out there who would be happy to help.  All of my tattoos have been walk-ins, and I love every one.

And this brings us back to the beginning.  Leave your leather jacket at home with your hangups and your image.  When you enter the tattoo parlor for your appointment, you will be sized up and stripped apart by everyone in the joint.  The harder you try to look like you belong, the more you’ll stick out.  If you know some lingo, or are somewhat familiar with the business, shut the hell up.  Nobody’s going to be impressed by your sycophancy, and that’s the worst way to warm up to an artist who deals with a hundred wannabe assholes like you every day.  As in most of life’s situations, it is better to be honest about who you are.  And if tattoos aren’t for you, that’s okay too.  Indelible marks on your skin are a blatant cry for attention, regardless of how you spin it.  No matter how balanced or self-aware you seem.  That goes for everyone, from me to Angelina Jolie and all the guys at Miami Ink.

One more thing: tattoos are addictive.  You get one, you’ll want another one, bigger and bolder than the first.  Especially if, like me, you happen to get an absolute babe for an artist with ink all over her, who likes to talk about books and movies for three hours while her hands are pressed against your back and she’s whistling to the music and it’s blowing on your neck and…sigh.  I think I’m in love.  With tattoos, that is.

.Cigol

A brief, philosophical departure from my usual artsy-fartsy wordplay:

If a piano falls from twenty stories and splinters on the sidewalk, barely missing a pregnant woman, it happened for a reason.  The evangelists and bible-thumpers will praise Almighty God and send telekinetic Thank-yous to Jesus.  The muezzins will wail, crying Miracle! Miracle!, Allah has saved her!  Buddhists will do whatever they do, all life is sacred and that junk.

Me?  I’d say: “Lucky bitch.”

If a piano falls from twenty stories and splinters on the sidewalk, spraying the hapless mother with shards of ivory and painted wood, it did happen for a reason.  It happened because the cable holding the piano snapped, or the crane buckled, or the men positioned at the window to receive it were careless or tired or stupid or distracted.  In other words, it happened due to its cause, not for its effect.  Nothing happens for its effect.

People do things for effect, sure.  But objects cannot forecast events.  Natural disasters and animals are no more prescient than falling rocks, ice, or Steinways.  So when people throw around bilious platitudes like “Everything happens for a reason,” I am forced to concentrate on not vomiting, and not punching them.  Where do people learn to talk like that?  If a plane crashes and two hundred people die but a single infant survives, it’s a “miracle.”  It is not a miracle.  Two hundred people died as the result of a high-velocity impact and the subsequent explosion of volatile jet-fuel.  One human escaped by a very unlikely margin.  Fantastic.  Baby won the life-lottery.  Now it’s an orphan, and in twenty years will probably be addicted to heroine and wishing it had died in that plane crash with its parents.

Nobody has ever survived a catastrophe due to the will of the catastrophe.  Humans have this unfortunate penchant for ascribing consciousness to events, forces, and other non-sentient nouns.  However unromantic, an event is nothing but the result of another event.  Let’s say a particularly hedonistic man realizes the error of his materialistic ways after a hurricane destroys his mansion and expensive car.  The hurricane destroyed his house because he bought property in a town in the path of the hurricane.  The hurricane itself was caused by a confluence of pressure systems in the middle of the ocean, which were the result of tides and currents, with were the result of the orientation of the seabed and the gravitational pull of the moon, which resulted from maybe an asteroid or something a long fucking time ago.  It was not god diverting a storm to teach the homeowner a lesson in virtue.

Everybody learns lessons based on experiences.  But it was never the intention of the experience to teach the lesson–experiences do not have intentions.  The lesson was just a byproduct.  Like shit is a byproduct of eating food.  You don’t eat food for the sake of shitting.  If you do, well…I can’t help you.

Warm in a Rainstorm

Bought a radio yesterday, one to take with me traveling.  Listening to it now reminds me of my father, crackly and warm with that sameness and comfort sound.

My father drove with the windows down, always windnoise and the radio in our loud, sturdy cars.  Driving with my father.  Hours and hours of my childhood spent as a happysafe passenger, the world blurring by.  We would deliver things, mostly.  Delivering mail, delivering newspapers, delivering carnival equipment.  Phonebooks.  Chips.  Bread.  People needed these things and my father had them and would drive, hours and hours, and I would ride along.

Windows down, outside blowing in.  All the way in spring and summer, half in the fall, just a few inches in winter.  The wind blew through my thin boy skin.  I froze, but gritted my teeth because he wasn’t cold so I wasn’t either.  I Was. Not. Cold.  But he would see my stubborn shivering and chuckle and turn the heat on me, blasting.  “What are you, chilly?” he’d say.

And in that warmth we’d talk.  But talking meant yelling over the wind and the heat and the shumbling of the chips or phonebooks or boxes in back, the gusting and the radio.  He’d yell and I’d strain against my seatbelt to catch every word before it tumbled out the window.  His advice and opinions, his sensibilities flying like paper in the disheveled cockpit of our sensible car.  I’d shout back and nod furious agreement, an obstreperous manboy refusing to be drowned out.  We could have turned down the radio, sure.  We could’ve rolled the windows up and spoken in even tones.  But that was only when it rained.

In the rain or a bad storm the windows would squeak up into their rubber gaskets.  Wipers traced a predictable path, groaning mechanical apologies.  We would talk low, then, with the heat on our shoes and the drudgy road furling out for wet miles ahead.  Radio just a mumble in the background.  There was always a stop to buy steaming drinks on those days, at a humid convenience store with spools of lotto tickets and fogged up coolers and pizza slices for a dollar, spinning under hot-lamps on the counter.  Run inside splashing while Dad pumped gas, he gave me the money, trusting me in the squalling blustering madness outside the car.

I’d sprint hot breath to the door and pant inside, soaking or covered in lumps of slushbrown parkinglot snow.  One big coffee, biggest they’ve got, and a Snickers.  And sometimes those pretzel sticks in the brown bag, the honey mustard kind that got under your fingernails.  Cream and sugar, I knew how much, and then hot chocolate, not as  big but close.  Hot chocolate with a little coffee inside.  Maybe a spinning melty slice of pizza, I would salivate deliciously, standing tall as I could, laden and waiting in line.

The radio would be on, I knew, back in the car.  My body would still fit in the dent I had wiggled for myself in the seat next to my father.  Steamhot drinks would fit between our knees, foodstuffs on a box between us for easy, no-look reaching.  We would start our conversation where we had left it, where the car had kept it idling.  And just to keep our breathy fog off the glass, Dad would crack a window as we drove away.

Part I

We are shoulder to shoulder.  We are worlds apart.  Our headtorches do little to illuminate the corridor, damp mold caking, eating the walls and ceiling, turning everything a lugubrious greybrown.  It eats even the light.

Treading careful, testing each step through the shards of dangerous decay, evidence of collapse all around us, is in front of us and we clamber over, mindful of nails and tetanus.  Alert to every creak, every tremor, every shift in weight and all the jagged, rusty teeth of this building’s fractured skeleton exposed, jeering, clawing like a devil trying to chew our flesh.  We don’t speak.  We don’t need to.  The structure groans our anxieties for us and sways our indecision, crumbles our confusions on the floor in splintered mud and filth.  We don’t speak, shoulder to shoulder, worlds apart.  We are best friends on a prowling adventure in the cold belly of a forgotten place.  Below the world where things are rotten and alive, where paint balloons in pillows on the walls.  Below the day where nighttime is forever and everything that was soft is now hard, hard now soft.  Where everything is what it couldn’t be until it was forgotten.  Where we are Men, and are confident.  Where our course is clear and pure.  We say nothing because we are breathing this building, making it part of us.  We are this building.  We are worlds apart.

We are worlds apart.  I am in Darkest Africa chasing, sweating, scribbling important notes you will read.  Once I have returned home you want to read what I have written but I am grinning and I might never return.  I am chasing Burton and Theroux through wild jungles and I am beside Everest eaten by frost, earning my scars.  I want scars, so many scars, because otherwise I am like all the other buildings pristine that people walk through.  You can’t walk through me.  You can never walk through me.

Worlds apart, shoulder to shoulder, Mark doesn’t have writer eyes like me.  He doesn’t see the darkness, he sees the light with his photographer eyes like shutters, blinking.  Where I observe he composes, where I take liberties he captures, concrete.  We are best friends on and adventure in the belly of the beast that used to be used as a building.  I reach for metaphors and he sees negative space and once we were boys, just once.  But once is enough when you’re chasing girls, because girls are realer than these ethereal dust motes in the dark.  Used to chase girls and talk about them and how they moved and why, why do they move like that?  How can we sleep when they move like that?  We were clueless and now we’re still clueless, just about more.  We still don’t know about girls.  We are still shoulder to shoulder in the dark.  We are slowly peeling, waiting for someone to see underneath, break in and discover the dark basement and see what we’re hiding.  We are here to explore ourselves because we know this place, this derelict hospital.  And it knows us, and we are grateful.  We tread so lightly, nobody will know we were here.

Last Year’s Firsts Last Years

The cat’s breathing low, rumbling inside, rubbing her cheeks against the monitor and it’s shaking in the quiet, now.  Only electronics thirring in the background and occasionally the fridge; roommates and friends all passed out from reveling and I’m awake with the cat breathing, breathing.  And I am older.

Now I’m remembering, fondly, that year when I was twenty-one.  First dates, drinks, kisses, first time dancing at a wedding.  Maybe last time dancing at a wedding.  Was the year I discovered my affinity for new travel writing and old scotch.  When I discovered that homelessness is the fulcrum between weariness and liberation and home, for me, is equal parts comfort and claustrophobia.  At twenty-one, I discovered the perfect ratio of coffee to cream.

I discovered the fascinating, slow-eyed girl who Monday-through-Thursdays the night shift in the bookstore cafe, who is unceasingly confounded by the enigmas surrounding the espresso machine.  Mysteries like counting and simultaneous motor function, and the intricacies of Hot and Cold, On and Off, Left and Right…I discovered the virtuosity of patience, and my general lack thereof.

Another year’s worth of cynicism weighing on my jaded scale, balanced against the grace of a year’s beautiful moments.  Beautiful feelings.  Beautiful awkward silences and memorable nervous twinges.  Another year’s worth of friends, acquaintances, and reasons to dislike people.

One of my roommates is in his bed, fucking the British girl from work.  He owes me money and I guess I must be older because a year ago this paragraph would’ve been part of somebody else’s life.  Older and of another world full of drugs and liquor, sex and heavy things.  But this is my life.  This is my bottle-strewn kitchen table.  This is my tattooed body hunched and tired but strong, young but older and wanting and waiting to not be waiting anymore.