The three poisons: Greed

It has been said that all the suffering we endure in our lives comes from one of three causes, because they result in so much misery they have been called the “three poisons” by Buddhists. When I think of the word poison I picture a vial of some greenish liquid that sneakily and slowly kills or sickens whoever gets it slipped into their drink. Poison works deviously, almost imperceptibly at times, the way that a rabbit when bitten by a snake at first appears to escape, then slows, and finally dies. If you saw the rabbit moments after it was bitten you might believe that everything was ok, but the poison would be working its way through the rabbits blood stream whether or not you could see it and whether or not the rabbit was aware of having the poison inside of it.

While there are millions of individual reasons we suffer, they can generally be put into the broad categories of Greed, Aversion, and Ignorance.

Greed can be obvious and I thought I knew pretty much what greed was without having to think very hard about it, but the very nature of poison is that it is easily mistaken for something less dangerous. I could clearly see that desiring too much money or sex or power or fame lead to all sorts of problems whether or not I achieve any of them, in fact the achieving of them just seemed to lead to even more greed, pretty clear cut, right? Not so fast though, what if the desire to not be greedy was also the poison of greed? Buddhism is not about being “good” and not “bad”, it is about looking deep enough to see the causes of suffering in anything, even supposedly beneficial things! The problem is not that greed arises in us, it is that when we don’t see it for the bottomless pit that it is, we keep taking the poison over and over and never knowing why we suffer.

I’ve met many Buddhists who were “greedy” for enlightenment (whatever that is) and plenty of well-meaning people who were greedy for the power to save the environment, even a particularly modest person can be greedy for things even if it’s just to give them to others. Do these folks with their “nice” greed suffer any less than some slimy businessman who is greedy for more mundane things like money and power? In my experience  they both experience the same dissatisfaction, the same looking outward for “more” , and the same inability to appreciate what the currently are experiencing.

Greed is also so dangerous to our freedom from suffering because it is impossible to really satisfy it. It’s hard to believe that winning the lottery or meeting Mr. or Ms. “Right” wont make us happy, and yet time and again people when given everything they believed they ever wanted are sooner or later (usually sooner) confronted with the depressing realization that they are still not very happy. Even with a billion dollars, and even with sex and money and power the thirst is still there demanding more, like Audry II insisting that Seymore “Feed me!“

I have a theory as to why rich, powerful, and famous people seem to go crazy at a higher rate than the rest of us and it’s because of greed. If  are Mr. Poor and find yourself  living alone in a shitty tenement then money and fame seem like the one thing that could take away your suffering. It might never happen but you can at least have that dream hat some day, maybe, you would hit that powerball, get that dream job, meet that “special” someone and then you would be free of that terrible lonely feeling, that worry about where the rent money was coming from that concern that nagging feeling that you are doomed! But what if you are rich and/or powerful? Then you wake up just as miserable as anyone else and you don’t have the luxury of thinking “if only I had money/power/a beautiful lover then I would be happy”, they often wake up in possession of all three and still cant bear to face the world!

According to the poor guy Mr. Successful should be super happy, content,  and at peace with all those basic concerns taken care of and yet they almost never are! CEO’s already drowning in money cheat the stock market for another million bucks, people whose spouses are on the top 10 sexiest list of some magazine cheat on them with hookers and druggies, politicians get caught cheating on their spouses and taking bribes over and over when Mr. Poor would be satisfied with 1/10th of Mr. Succesfuls life. Kurt Cobain becomes a rock star and a father and still kills himself. They have “it all” and suffering still gnaws on their souls as viciously as the rest of us.

Why? Because where there is greed there is suffering, and greed is endless. If you win the lottery tomorrow its only a matter of time until you begin to feel that little itch that says “not enough! more!”

The solution can not be to eliminate greed because its only human to want more and the solution will not work if it ignores basic human design. What the Buddha taught, then,  was not a way to destroy greed, it was a way to see it as it really is. To label the poison bottle before we accidentally take a drink of it! To learn to recognize it before it has slipped into our life and begun to do its deadly work.In meditation we learn to be aware of what is in this moment, to witness the arising and fading away of all sorts of crazy shit from our brain, including the greed for ms.sexypants or a new lexus and seeing it clearly for what it is does an interesting thing, it ruins it. Greed only works because we believe that the promise of whatever that thing we thirst for will satisfy everything, so when you see it arise as it has throughout our life and we begin to see it as the same thirst we have felt over and over without it ever being satiated we simply begin to refuse to play its game.  You don’t stop desiring or wanting to improve your life, but you do stop believing that something “out there” can ever really end your suffering. We begin to accept that getting our satisfaction is going to have to come from within ourselves if its going to happen at all.

 

Some things

Sometimes what looks like a bad day can turn into a good one in the blink of an eye. On the first day we were back at work in 2012 I had a full day of appointments cancel with less than 12 hours notice. It was kind of a bummer because I have many customers waiting for an appointment and when someone is a no-show with so little notice its hard to get one of those people in. It’s not really so unfair to me, but it is very unfair to the people who have been waiting to get in and can’t just take off work or rearrange their live to come in on such short notice.

Anyway through the magic of Facebook we put the word out that I had some time open and two great regulars were able to step in on short notice. Not only did I get a couple loyal regulars in, but I was really stoked on both tattoos I did!

First up was N. One of those clients who I just knew from the first tattoo was going to become heavily tattooed! Some people just get that sparkle in their eyes the minute they look in the mirror at their first lil tattoo and you know that they have fallen in love with tattoos. He is also one of those customers you can really have a conversation while you are tattooing, one of the great side benefits of being a tattooer is having one on one time with people from all walks of life and philosophies. So we started a squid about a year ago and due to his job was only able to get an occasional session here and there on it til yesterday when we finished this bad boy. . .

As we were working on this another long time shop buddy called and asked if I would have time to do a portrait of their dog. Now i do a lot of kinds of tattoo but portraits (and portraits of dogs especially) I don’t do, not because I don’t want to, but because it’s just not my thing and I can’t do an amazing version of it the way some other tattooers in Pittsburgh could. In this case though he insisted I could do it more “traditional-ish” and since he is a shop buddy I told him to come down and let me look at what he wanted. As soon as i saw the picture of this adorable little guy I was in! T’s dog is part corgi and part dachshund and if that isn’t a formula for the cutest dog in the world then his little smile surely makes him a contender for the prize! I wanted to get his lil tweaked paw (don’t worry, he apparently runs on it just fine) and smiley demeanor so I kept the background very simple and greywashy and put all the blacks and contrast into the pup itself. I was stoked to see it done!

So a day that started off looking like a wash-out turned into one of the more fun days I’ve had lately, yet again I’m grateful and conscious of how lucky I am!

 

2011 end.

12 months used to seem like a long time to me, like a road that you can’t see the end of over the curve of the planet. Hell you can form a human being (albeit a very rudimentary one) in 9 months, and by the time a year goes by you may hate those you once loved, you may have lost one or many you cared for, you may forget millions of thoughts and memories. A year seems like a long time. Or, it used to anyway. There’s a funny thing that happens as we get older, time (like Einstein told us when weren’t listening) stretches and contracts like elastic goo and the months, the years begin to come fast and somehow for all their speed with less urgency.

2011 has seemed to fly by for me even faster than last year, even more so when I realize just how many amazing people I have become close to this year alone. I worked conventions with Cara in 5 cities this year alone (and most of those in the first three months of the year!) I celebrated my one year anniversary and mourned the one year since our great friend Erica passed away. I have watched nieces and nephews grow up and begin to form the seeds of personalities. That mysterious process where one brother becomes a tiny gentleman and the other a tiny terrible viking, when a babies incoherent goo’s and bababa’s suddenly, almost imperceptibly begin to mean something.

I’ve wasted huge swaths of my year brainless and out of touch with reality, it’s a curse I often find myself battling. I slowly fade out and disengage from the world, sometimes for days, sometimes for months til one day some spark in my head flickers and I realize I have been sleepwalking and that its time to open up my eyes and really live! Maybe this is what depression looks like since I’ve started meditating, instead of curling in a ball and giving up I just robot my way through life til the gloom lifts? I don’t know, but the sure symptom is an overwhelming urge to play video-games for 6 hours at a time! (it might just be time to blow up my x box and computer)

I’ve felt the tiny step forward with my tattooing, I’m really sensitive to it these days. I’m hyper-aware of each miniscule bit of data and i jealously file it away in my brain knowing that eventually that they will pile up just enough for me to go up one small level closer to how I want my tattoos to look. I’m beginning to be patient with the process, beginning to see every line, every shading as practice. Drilling the new lessons into my muscles til they respond automatically and execute an idea that I could only imagine weeks or years before.

Cara and I have also begun to try to have a bay of our own in the past few weeks. She is awash in books and new information about things like basal temperatures and cervix positioning, its like she is studying for a graduate degree and having babies I feel sort of  lazy and stereotypical as I sit back and just wait for her to tell me when its the optimal time to give it a go. “Durr, jus’ tell me whar yew want this sperm, ma’am.” We have also had some interesting conversations about our relative readiness to have children, we may be fooling ourselves, but we both feel like any children we may have now will turn out a lot better than if we would have had them when we were younger, dumber, and far more self-centered. It’s a curious fact that its only after ones “optimum” child-bearing  years that we get our shit together enough to be the sort of parents any child of ours would deserve. Fuck, 25-year-old me couldn’t be trusted with raising a cat let alone something as complicated as a human!

So 2012 may be the big one for us, we are certainly hoping so, if we wait much longer my kids may have grampa-dad syndrome where I yell at my own kids to get the hell off my lawn!

Most of all right now i feel an enormous sense of gratitude. I am incredibly lucky to have been born into this life, to be surrounded by such loving and patient people, to be given a chance to make a living while at the same time always being challenged by that livelihood. I am truly lucky to want so little and to be given so much, so are all of you, I hope that in 2012 all of us can realize what a gift this life is.

More Weird random things I think about (and new tattoo pictures)

1. If you were to walk into a room full of people meditating it would appear a very serene place, you would hear almost nothing and that is a strange thing for us to hear in a room full of people these days. Every time I do,  I am struck by the fact of how peaceful it all feels, it’s a pleasant moment to bask in all that gentle contemplation. If only it were true! The fact is that most (perhaps all) of those quiet mediators are awash in ideas, thoughts, bits of a half-remembered Pink Floyd songs, vague musings on the perfect shape of the neighbors spouses’ rear end, the bubbling resentment of last weeks argument, and very often, the pricking thought about how one shouldn’t be thinking the things that one is thinking while meditating. Certainly it all calms down, gets somewhat quiet in there with time, but I have never yet gotten up and left the zendo when a friend doesn’t look and me shaking his head and say “man, my brain was all over the place today!” With practice we learn to let these brain burps go by unmolested for the most part but the mind never really ceases sending random bits of thought up the pipe.

2. Tracing paper. It can make or break a tattoo drawing experience. I’m not kidding either, when you use as much of the stuff as tattooers do you get very picky about what you use. For me its Canson or nothing, and nothing else has the smooth, durable texture, clarity and erasibility of this stuff. No one, and I mean NO ONE else makes tracing paper like this, its like some kind of top secret formula. When I have to use that mashed potato looking, shredding, shit-paper from strathmore I always feel like someone took away my steak dinner and replaced it with a steaming turd (and keep in mind that Strathmore is my second favorite. . . ) I’m so serious that I order boxes of the Canson stuff when there is an art supply store selling the other brand right across the street from the shop.

3. I am the worlds biggest poopbutt when it comes to putting up a Christmas tree and lights and all that. The practical part of my mind just goes “why!? it’s a lot of energy for no reason!” Then Cara puts everything up, turns the lights on and I’m all “OOOHHH PRETTY!!!” And I remember why I’m not in charge of the world, it’s because I am a wet-blanket.

4. I heard a radio story about the new TinTin movie and remember fondly reading the comics. It seems like one cannot talk about Tintin without having to explain away or apologize for the fact that the stories Herge’ created in the 1930′s and 40′s contain what look to us as racist stereotypes and xenophobic mores. Which is all true but that is looking at the world through 2011 eyes and we forget that Herge’ had only his immediate experience of the world around him long before the internet and our more enlightened sensibilities. Into his 80′s he explained that had he known the world the way he did no in those days that he, of course, wouldn’t have written them that way. Before we turn too hard of a focus on the shameful attitudes of the past we should pause a minute to consider what future generations will say about us! This is, after all, the generation in which half the folks in this land don’t believe that homosexuals should be given equal rights and where we imprison and execute more people than any other nation, where we refuse to control exploitative and polluting corporations and deny the basic necessities of a society like health care and clean water to its poorest inhabitants. I’m not so sure that in 100 years people wont be looking back on US as the deplorable ones who “should have known better.”

5. If you can’t get into the spirit of the holidays listening to the Vince Guaraldi Trio then you need a soul transplant. the guy was a musical genius and had a killer mustache to boot. The guy died at 47 and I really miss what I’m sure would have been another 40+ years of awesome, evocative jazz. No one else seems to be able to capture that 10% sad/90% joyous sound at the same time the way he did.

Now for the pictures!

First up is a piece I have been working on for some time. The customer is an avid carp fisherman and had an old panther he wanted covered. He also has arms the size of tree trunks so we had quite a few sessions into these bad boys. As we went along i found out that his wife loves those little green poison arrow frogs and he wanted to get one in there for her, I was thrilled to get the lil squeaker in there with this big ol kois. In this first picture we had finished the lower arm and drew on the much larger cover-up koi with sharpies. For me the trick isn’t to try to place a pile of black over the cover-up, instead I’m trying to camouflage the old work while still preserving as much of the open skin as possible, ideally when its done you can’t tell there is a coverup at all. In my book the only thing that is worse than a bad tattoo is a cover-up of a bad tattoo that looks like a coverup.

So in this next picture is the final piece with only a bit on the triceps and top of the shoulder still healing. This tattoo took about 18 hours to finish. The client is a great guy and like many of these long session pieces we became friends and I learned a lot about his life and he learned to nod patiently as I went on and on like a babbling idiot

This next guy is known in Tibetan Buddhism and Hindu mythology as a Garuda. A sort of half man/half bird who is a protector and steed to the deities. The rainbow one represents the highest order (most protective) of them, i based the body and several illustrations of Garuda but the head I looked at some of the amazing and dramatic carvings from Bali, Indonesia, and the Tibet/Nepal area. this is part of a larger Buddhist themed sleeve that should be done in 2012.

Lastly I did this Indian maiden on a regular customer and aficionado of traditional tattoos. In this business you get to come across all sorts of interesting stories and this customer has a twin sister. I have tattooed them both extensively (and differently but every so often one of them will get a tattoo and within a few weeks the other will want the same subject matter. The trick is to do them differently enough so that it doesn’t look like I got lazy and used the same stencil twice! They both sit great and are wearing some of the best traditional type work I have been lucky enough to get to do.

That is it for now, I have some really cool pieces in the works and I cant wait to show them here soon. I really feel like I’m stepping up another level in my work! At this point i can almost feel when the ten thousand tiny little individual baby steps forward I have made are ready to coalesce into something visible to the casual viewer, I feel like I have been pushing really hard to keep progressing and hopefully it will be evident in my work.

Why ask why?

There is one question that I only seem to get asked by non-tattooed folks. “Why do you think people get tattoos?” I supposed I’m supposed to be some sort of authority on this because I do tattoos. I guess I do know a fair amount about tattoos in general, how they are applied, their history, the types of things which any trades-person in any craft would know just from being surrounded by their chosen work.but I gotta tell you, I really don’t have a clue why people get tattooed. I don’t think anyone does, to be honest. Id go so far as to say that anyone who can claim to give you a definitive answer is either selling something or is dangerously over-confident in their theories. By the way, tattooed people don’t ask that question very much, because they have an answer for themselves even if the vast majority of them couldn’t articulate it if they had to.

I think that tattooing is ne of those things which is too big to pin down, one of those things that wriggles under close observation like a scientist trying to study light. If you look at light one way its a wave, if you look at it another its a particle and according to everything we know about physics this isn’t supposed to be possible but there it is. Tattooing doesn’t make much sense either which, I suppose is why people try to make sense of it. Do people get tattooed to be separate from everyone or to join a trend, to express themselves or to copy the main-stream, to say something about themselves or as armor to hide behind? Ask 10 people and you will get 10 different answers that are all equally “right”.

In my business I’ve noticed a couple funny things about people’s varied motivation for getting tattooed. For one thing people getting their very first tattoo seem almost embarrassed if they don’t have a “reason” for getting tattooed. Sometimes they even try to shoehorn an explanation onto what is clearly just a cool idea for them (i.e. “I’m getting this Japanese dragon in memory of my dog” kind of things.)  It’s really not necessary. The other thing that’s funny is the sort of strange guilt a lot of folks feel at getting a tattoo, in our world we have a reason for everything. We justify ourselves all the time even it is just in our own heads, these rationalizations can get pretty goofy too (“I bought a dodge charger because my uncles brother always wanted one in 1968. . . “) The truth is for most people that they are getting a tattoo just because it makes them feel good, and many of them act as if admitting this is tantamount to admitting to enjoying  jacking off. Its ok though, in fact getting a tattoo just because it makes you happy is the BEST reason in my book.

I’ve read some pretty scholarly books about tattooing and one thing has become apparent. The books written by non-tattooed authors always look at tattooing as a sickness (perhaps they will admit that it’s a benign sickness, they still write like its somewhat. . .  icky”).

Joseph Campbell once said “In art the meaning IS the art itself. If you ask a painter what his painting means you are going to get a LOOK from him. Just SEE it, it’s all right there, you don’t need someone to interpret it for you!” and Tattoos are definitely the same thing in my book. If you seek to understand tattoos then get one! It’s a magical thing really, you come into the shop with all sorts of preconceived notions, fears, ideas, you might be a  very smart person and think you have seen all the tattoo tv shows and read 400 books about tattoos and I can still promise you that after that first one, every single idea you had will be changed about tattoos. Every one.

You come out the other side with experience instead of inference. It’s the difference between being told what velvet feels like and actually touching it.

In Buddhism one eventually learns that a lot of those so-called burning terribly important questions are in fact a waste of time. Is there an afterlife, a god, heaven or hell, a soul? all that stuff we worry about and what did the wise teachers say when they were asked about this stuff? “Who cares!? Did you feed the dog yet? Did you do the dishes? Dont worry about what happens after you die til your dead! You have important stuff to do right now!” Once you get tattooed all those same sorts of questions go out the window too, “am I getting a tattoo for the ‘right reasons’? “will I still like it in a year?” “what if my friends don’t like it?”  “what if my mom kills me, etc.?” and yet when you are done all that stuff is gone *whissst* right out the window and instead you’re thinking “I wonder how long til I can get another one!”

 

 

Dont feed the A-holes

Cara and I have been traveling a LOT in the last 3 years, from Seattle to Reno, to Philly to Baltimore and more and more we have been to a ton of shops and met more tattoo people in the past few years than in my entire tattoo career up to that point. We have been to a ton of conventions, we have visited a ton of tattoo shops. We have been tattooed or done tattoos on dozens of tattooers and artists in general. We have also owned our own shop for the past 3 years and  our clients runs the gamut from custom sleeves and backs to walk-in names and stars on ankles. I have read hundreds of interviews with people whose work I admire and found that someone who is a great artist is not always a great person.

It turns out that many of my former tattoo heroes are, in fact, fucking assholes. Tattooing, to no ones surprise is actually filled with people just as neurotic and insecure as any other pile of folks in the world, the problem is that in tattooing these people can still be sought after and lauded even as their behavior would earn them a punch in the mouth in just about any other profession. Unfortunately, the general public has been sold the idea that in order to get a good tattoo they must often put up with a dilettante attitude, sometimes even stroke the ego of someone who is being clearly a dick to them.

I’m here to tell you that you don’t.

Perhaps many years ago the pickings were pretty slim when it came to quality work, there might have been just a handful of tattooers in your town and if the one good guy in your area was a prick then you just had to suck it up and deal with him (and they were mostly men in those days) or get crappy tattoos. In the past decade however the bar for good work has been raised and raised and there are tons of great tattooers around, many (if not most) of whom are willing to treat you as they themselves would like to be treated. For better or for worse the experience you have during the tattoo can and will color you opinion of that tattoo for a long time after its done and a great tattoo can feel a little less awesome if you had to deal with an asshole getting it.

In 1859 Charles Darwin published his monumental “Origin of Species” which, among many other things, posited the idea that traits which benefited a species were passed on while those which were harmful were weeded out as the “unfit” members of a species failed to pass their genes on in the form of a new generation. I believe that it is time for the “unfit” tattooers (i.e. the dicks) to be starved out of existence. The survival of the fittest in tattooing can and should exclude those who believe that they are superior to the people they are tattooing. This can be accomplished quite easily of tattoo customers do the following.

1. on first contacting your tattooer are you able to get basic information easily? Is the contact person or artist helpful and up front about the reality of the artists work load (i.e. do they tell you the wait list length or do they just say “keep calling back”?)

2. Are you able to schedule a consultation with your artist in person?

3. If the artist is into your idea does he or she listen to your ideas and if they disagree do they give you reasons for their contrary opinion. (i.e “that idea is dumb” or “that wont work” with no explanation of why it wont work?) If they can’t do your idea do they tell you its silly or impossible or do they refer you to someone who might be able to do the work?

4. Are they late to your appointment? Do they change the price dramatically mid-tattoo? do they come in bitching about their bad day, how drunk they got the night before, or how they just really don’t feel like tattooing that day/part of your body/ subject matter?

5. Do they take the time to make sure you are as comfortable as possible during the tattoo? We know that tattoos hurt, but if the artist doesn’t bother to make sure the position they put you in is comfortable or if they blast you with shitty loud music then an already painful tattoo can become intolerable.

6. Do they engage you as a person? ask your name? your job? do they spend the entire tattoo talking to other artists or douchy hang out guys in the shop while ignoring your presence?Do you feel like the shop is filled with people “too cool” to talk to you?

7. do they recommend how to care for your tattoo and seem genuinely interested in how it heals or do they wrap you up haphazardly and send you out the door with no information or recommendation for aftercare?

If any of these sounds like the shop you are in then your tattoo is supporting a douche-bag. Regardless of the quality of work I can guarantee that there is someone else in tattooing who can do the same or better without treating you like a piece of meat with a wallet. The fact is that the vast majority of great tattooers are humble, honest, and interested in their work representing them in a positive light, give one of them your business.

Dr.Quack says. . .

The Best Convention Ever.

How do we, as tattooers, define a “good tattoo convention”? For a lot of us, the definition of a good convention is one where we make a bunch of money, and if we don’t then the whole thing is considered a failure. I used to think this way myself, In fact I would get pretty stressed out about it, I wanted to make back my booth fee, cover the hotel, then there was the cost of food and gas for the weekend, in short I used to figure out how much it was costing me to attend the convention and get really really tense until I had made more money than my “investment”. It was like playing the stock market or gambling (and they are basically the same thing only its easier to cheat at the stock market. . .) where I started at a loss and struggled to make my initial money back plus more.

This weekend my wife Cara and I attended Pittsburgh’s Meeting of the Marked convention for what must be the 10th time and I barely made a dime (mostly by choice, but ill get to that later) .  Yet it was, without a doubt, the Best Convention I have ever attended. The gentleman who puts it on, Tim Azinger is one of the friendliest and most genuine people one could hope to deal with in a business filled with shysters, thieves, and scumbags who usually are the ones to run conventions. For 19 years Tim has put on a show that feels like a family reunion and Cara and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Like many people I was very motivated by money for most of my life and when money wasn’t there I got upset by it and fearful. It made conventions very stressful. Some years ago I began meditating because all the stress I was going through, it was killing me,( both metaphorically and literally). I wasnt looking for “enlightenment” or an “end to delusion”, I was looking for an end to acid reflux, hypertension, and suicidal thoughts. Worry about money (and a lot of other things) had driven me to look for any means to find refuge from my stress.

Once I had a little while with meditation under my belt, I began to notice that my greed had a way of never being satiated. Ever. Greed had a way of rising to meet whatever I had and saying “not enough”. When I was living on $120 per week working at a camera store it said “not enough” and when I was living on double that amount working in  a kitchen it said “not enough’ and no matter how well I have done since then the voice of greed has always said “not enough”, only these days I don’t listen to it so much. I finally realised that if I did the right thing, If I tried my best at whatever job I had  and kept treating other people as if I was dealing with myself that I would have enough. In fact what I realized was that it was easier to consider whatever I was making “enough” than to always worry about what I didn’t have.

So at this weekends Meeting of the Marked I deliberately did not set up any appointments, instead I tattooed my friends (for free) and a couple regular customers I like for cheap. I turned down work that would have made some money and sent a couple of my regular customers who wanted me to tattoo them  to other tattooers I am friends with. In short, I had fun. This was the most relaxed I have ever been at a convention and I got to talk to more of my peers, to look at really talented people working, to learn some technical tricks, and to just bask in the glow of 100 artists in a room doing what they do best. There is a lot of inspiring energy when you get that many tattooers together and as long as you aren’t obscuring that energy with worry about money you can find yourself recharged and ready to create like a motherfucker!

I gave away more flash and T- shirts than I sold and yet somehow Cara and  I ended up with 2 new tattoo machines each , a new painting, and a bunch of new people who want to get tattooed by us (and I still made money). Tattooing as a business,  can be a battle or an art. If you see it as a battle then you will have no end of adversaries, struggles, and like any war, everyone comes out damaged, even the “winner”. If you see it as an art then you will have no end of inspiration, co-creators, and everyone comes out uplifted.

Do I sound sappy? Good. Being grateful often sounds sentimental, and I’m tremendously grateful for my life, my work, the people I am inspired by and the chance to try to give back as much as I am given. Some people sat in their booth and struggled to make money this weekend, I joked around with Tim’s son who I first met as a 7-year-old and is now 15, I watched a good friend get a portrait of Kelly Clarkson on his thigh (and he was serious about that shit), I watched an adorable 2 1/2-year-old do the hustle at an Indian restaurant, and I got to watch the love of my life tattoo like she was an old pro and not someone who has only been doing it for 3 or so years. I sat in a room full of friends and realized just how lucky I am to have been born into this life.

This was a very good convention.

Go let it out.

If you are not a fan of Oasis (and you should be) then click here to see the reference for this posts title.

I’ll wait. . . .

Ok that’s not really the reason I picked that tile, the actual thinking behind that title is the notion that people sometimes need to “vent” emotion. They literally have to “let it out”, I certainly used to subscribe to the notion that if I was feeling a strong emotion that I needed to somehow give that emotion an “outlet”. If the emotion was anger I would frequently punch or break something, if the emotion was sadness or shame I would vent by writing about or crying to someone else about how I felt. Like most people who have grown up in the western world I had been raised with an almost pathological fear of keeping my emotions “bottled up”. It was far better, I believed, to act on my strong emotions and thereby “vent” them, to keep them inside would lead to all sorts of problems I was told, ulcers, becoming crazy, and even suicide were given as reasons why suppressing strong emotions were bad.

Which of course was all based on the supposition that there was something there which really wasnt there at all. Lets take anger for example, when one is really really angry we feel the need to vent that anger, but what, exactly is “vented”? I mean, many kitchens have a cooking device called a pressure cooker, it’s an airtight kettle which builds up steam and pressure to cook food very quickly, because of the internal pressure you cannot open the device until all the steam has been vented, you open a valve and *PSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHH!* steam comes out! So what comes out when you “vent your anger”? Anger? I am not so sure about that, because when steam is vented you can catch a cup of it and in that cup you will find water and air, but you can’t catch a cup of anger! Where does this anger get vented from? your ears? your mouth? your fists?

No, anger really does not  “come out” because there is not an object called anger which needs to be released. Anger (and all emotions) are the electro-chemical secretions of our brains, it’s a reaction that, in nature, is a brief flash and a momentary spike to spur your body to produce adrenaline and endorphins in case of  a fight-or-flight situation, but it only lasts a short time in other mammals. Your body creates all kinds of other secretions, things like hormones, digestive juices, insulin, and yet we seem to pay far more attention to the secretions of that single 4 pound organ on top of our necks than all the other stuff our body secretes. The flash of anger that you feel when someone bumps you is natural, if you are still mad at that person an hour later it’s because you want to be, not because you have to be. We feel like our emotions just happen and that we are merely passengers along for the ride but the truth is far more interesting, and well within our control. Our minds love to remind us that you are not the same as everyone else, in fact it is damn near our minds’ full-time job to constantly reinforce this notion that *I* am real, *I* am separate, from everything else, and *I* constant. But, Buddhism tells us that none of this is true and it doesn’t take more than a cursory look to see that those three cherished notions are all based on a false belief. Our minds really dont like that reality, so one of the minds most compelling ways to convince us that these fictions are real is to use emotion.

Here’s how; when we feel the very natural and normal first flash of some emotion it feels very good (yes even the bad ones) to our brain, it energizes that sense of self to say “WOW!  Here I am! All this energy is proof that I’m REALLY REAL!” and even better if the emotion is depression or anger, the mind can say “IM REAL and I’m not like THOSE people over there! ” So it takes that natural flash and stokes it, feeds it,  tells itself stories about it so we hold onto it.  Some people can hold onto anger for their entire lives! Everyone else looks at them and thinks “that dude is still mad about getting punched in 3rd grade and he is 43 years old!?” but that 43-year-old can still conjure up the image and feeling of that moment, the shame, the powerlessness, the anger of the event and it , sadly, sickly, makes him feel better. It makes him feel Real.

People like to feel mad, to feel righteous or put upon or misunderstood, because as bad as those feelings are there is something worse in the dark corners of their world, the fear that without these strong emotions, without the constant reinforcement that maybe there just . . .isn’t. . .anyone. . . there. . .at. . . .all.

So am I proposing that we all act like this guy?

Of course not. Emotions (for all the pain they cause) make life fun and interesting, they drive us to innovate, to right injustice, and to make babies among many other things, but they do all that naturally without us adding artificial energy to them. How do I know this? because I went from being one of the most emotional, angry, pissy, melancholy people you would ever not like to meet to a person whose anger lasts seconds and whose formerly epic bouts of depression stick around for mere hours anymore. I’m not “better” than i was, I just started meditating and one of the many side benefits of meditation is that you get a few seconds of breathing room in your mind when someone steps on your toe or some guy cuts you off in traffic and while I still say “OW!” or “That asshole!!” like everyone else, once that initial, natural moment of emotion passes then im done with it.

Its pretty fucking awesome and I realized that all that “venting” I had done in my younger years was really just stoking up my sense of self. it was, in a mental sense, masturbation, making myself feel good by feeling “bad”. In Hardcore Zen, Brad Warner compares it to a pig loving the feeling of rolling around in its own shit, and that image has always struck me as so appropriate to all this “venting’ we feel the need to do.

In many cultures it is not considered appropriate to express strong emotions the way we do in the west, I used to think that this was due to some repressive fault in the culture, but more and more I begin to see that these societies just seem to recognise these overwrought displays as public jerking off and discourage it. We marvel at how the Norwegians who were harmed when a white power sociopath went on a shooting spree still don’t want to see the shooter executed, we can’t believe that they say things like “we refuse to give up our countries belief in rehabilitation instead of punishment in its legal system even in this case” because we would fall all over ourselves to demonstrate how angry, shocked, and sad we were. It’s not that we are bad for indulging in these type of self-confirming behaviors, we have been raised to see them as normal and natural and healthy when in fact it is none of those things.

Think differently

So Steve Jobs dies yesterday which is sad for the same reason its sad when anyone dies, however the wailing and public mourning has been somewhat. . . trying to me of late. It has brought to the fore a subject I often puzzled over; namely, the way that people took to the Apple brand as if it was some sort of cult or political creed. Dont get me wrong, I am well aware of the company’s contribution to the aesthetic and ease of use of modern electronics, without Apple (and by extension Jobs I suppose) our gadgets wouldn’t look half so good nor function half so intuitively. And yet, and yet, people behave like this entity, this Corporation, is their friend and Jobs a member of their family. He wasnt, he was the head of a large company whose job was to convince you and I to spend our money with them as opposed to some other giant company. Apple was neither more kind or considerate than any other gigantic corporate entity. The hired and fired, the acquired competition and sued for tax breaks and tried to keep their workers wages low, so low that they off shored their work to countries with poor worker rights and pay. Just like every other corporation. So I am very puzzled when I see an Apple badge on someones car or T-shirt, why don’t these folks have American Standard toilet stickers on their cars? Why dont college kids wear backpack maker, Jansport, t-shirts? Why have otherwise discerning and intelligent people align themselves with something generally regarded as icky and exploitative as a Corporate entity?

 

Im not saying they are worse than any other large company, Im just saying that they are just like every other large company.