Burgers n Bikes

This memorial day Cara and I rode our bikes over to my parents for some cook out action, Ive been thinking about getting a single speed, light bike for some time so for the whole day I left my bike in one gear to see what hitting climbs and starting from a dead stop at traffic lights would be like. Even the relatively steep cobblestone hill leading up to the street my parents live on was no real problem.

I also learned that one of my brothers reads this blog. (Hi Kevin!) Which is sort of strange in a way, mainly for the fact that I actually talk a lot more about my personal feelings and life on here than I do to my family. Lambert gatherings tend to be closer to a celebrity roast than a Hallmark moment. We are not big huggers or vocal with our affection, its more of an understood thing, but that didn’t stop me being jealous of my friends who talk openly about their love for each other with their families when I was younger. Still, we have much more fun and almost none of that family drama of most folks I know and I have yet to visit for a holiday where I’m not laughing my ass off most of the time.

For example, as we were all sitting around the backyard with various kids and dogs running around everywhere, my dad starts talking about a person he knows with different colored eyes.
“Hes got one Blue eye and one Brown Eye” and with consummate comedic timing (a Lambert genetic trait) one of my brothers calmly adds “Yea, Ive got two blue eyes and one brown eye”.

Now we were all busted up by this, including my mom who tries her best to be un-amused by everything and yet can not hide her emotions at all. At the same moment she will say something like “that’s disgusting” she also has this giant shit eating grin on her face totally negating her attempt at moral reserve.

By the way, the burgers were delicious.

Anyhow Kevin mentioned how this has been slowly turning into a bike blog. I cant really deny it, in fact I cant even really say that it wont be about making taffy or the grapefruit diet by this time next year. Like a lot of guys I tend to pick up a hobby, some small thing will spark an interest and all of the sudden I’m reading everything I can on the subject and talking about it non-stop (poor Cara. . .). I get obsessed by something for a while and then, eventually, I put it down again. . .forever.

Sometimes stuff is useless and transient, my once all consuming love for cameras is long gone and I rarely take pictures at all unless its of a tattoo. The same goes for my fascination with handmade knives or military history. But, sometimes it sticks around like my 7+year love affair with Buddhism and my 12+ year fascination with tattooing.

The jury is still out about bikes. Maybe a harsh winter will kill it, maybe a wreck, or maybe Ill just see some other newer thing that is shiny and pretty and my bike will gather dust and cobwebs while I’m off kayaking or basket weaving somewhere. However,in favor of its lasting.  riding has led to some pretty incredible changes in my life.

For one thing I have lost nearly 12 pounds in 2 months and I have drastically altered my relationship to food. Instead of eating food for boredom or as a comfort, I treat food as fuel, I eat amazingly less than I did, crave almost nothing anymore, and am careful to burn more calories than I take in. Food has ceased to be a love/hate relationship and become simply a fact of life that I enjoy in moderation. When I ride a bike I don’t want cupcakes and giant bowls of cereal, I actually find myself looking hungrily at a pear or a handful or raisins instead. No one is more surprised by this than me!

When I first wanted to buy a bike this past February, I had a very specific idea about what I wanted and why. I wanted a commuter bike, with fenders and racks, I wanted to be able to haul stuff and I wanted a bike I could oaf around on, crashing pot holes and curbs without worrying about too much. In short, I wanted a beast. So I bought one.

I love the bike I bought, I commuted with it every day and on my days off I would take it on long long rides around the city. As I got closer to some form of physical fitness (still far away, but not as far these days) I realised that in some situations my bike was holding me back.

It was heavy as hell for one thing, the wide tires seemed to drag on long climbs for another, at the end of a few hours ride I literally felt like I had an anchor chain wrapped around the bike. I seldom used the gears anymore except to get a quicker start at stop lights. It was time to go lighter. I began to look online at lighter, single speed bikes.

There is something in the male mind that is obsessed with simplicity.We love nothing more than to pare every item down to utilitarian minimalism, I suppose it appeals to our macho need for effectiveness.( To this day I still cant look at a peacock without wondering if he wouldn’t just be better off with one feather and some bells rather than to lug that ornate feather duster around everywhere. I wanted a bike that simple, minimal, like if the Vulcans and Japanese got together to make a bike as functional and basic as possible. No hipster fix gear dangerous trend-monster either, I needed  a functional daily ride that didn’t drag my ass down more than my own ass already did.

So on my search I went to 4 different bike shops yesterday. I may impulsive, but I am impulsive with an obsessive thoroughness that makes it OK, right? There were several contenders, one shop turned me off with the kind of hard sell bullshit we used to pull back in my camera shop days (“Yea I know you told me your upper price limit, but just look at this beauty for only a couple hundred more!”) Another apparently only had bikes for 6 foot 5inch giants with 52 inch inseams. Finally I found the right one at the right price. Here she. . .er. .I mean. . .here IT is.

Trek Soho-S

Did I mention that it was pouring down rain all day yesterday? Oh I’m not only impulsive, I’m impulsive and pig-headedly stubborn which makes it OK, right? So I rode my new baby home in the rain and It felt amazing. I think it weighs a third of my old bike, its aluminum frame can not rust and its tiny inch wide tires seem to bear up under my bulk without a complaint or a flat (yet).

How much do i like it? Well, im going to ride it right now.

bye.

Little worry, big worry

It must have been frustrating in a way to be the Buddha. I cant help but have an image of the guy permanently serene and unflappable, but in reality he must have had to deal with some truly trying bullshit. Even Gandhi was known to lose his temper now and again, and the Buddha was dealing with a multitude of students, detractors, factionalism, skepticism and hostility. If I have learned one thing its that awakening is not some special magic state where nothing ever bugs you again, as the title of a great book on zen put it “After enlightenment, the dishes”. So you are awake? great! But the lawn is still going to need to be mowed, the dog still poops on the carpet and your great aunt will still send you 40 chain letter emails a day. The world doesn’t stop or fit our expectations with awakening, its just that we see all that’s going on clearly so we don’t get too hung up about it anymore.

So many of the supposed things the Buddha talked about were answers to questions. What is the meaning of life? will i be reincarnated? is there a soul? is the no such thing? What did that dream i had last week mean? Is there a god? and hundreds more just like that. If there was an existential or theological question i have no doubt that the poor guy got asked them all. A lot. In part it seems to be a natural thing for us humans to look for someone to tell us things that are, in reality, un tell-able. We expect our religious leaders to be particularly good at this. Ask a priest of most any faith  about what happens after you die and you WILL get an answer, delivered with a surety and authority that must seem comforting. But the Buddha wasn’t into comforting, he was into the truth. So when asked these questions his answer was less satisfying to those looking for an authority figure to live their lives for them.

The Buddha simply answered “The question does not fit the case.”  In his way he was trying to say “that question is worthless” but in a nice, Buddha-y way. Worthless because;

1)no one alive knows those answers from first hand experience.

In an old zen koan the emperor asks a monk “What happens after we die?” and the monk simply answers “don’t know.” The emperor responds with “Why don’t you know, you are a holy man!?” to which the monk answers, “Yes, but not a dead one.”

2) the questions lead from one theory to another, a tangle of ideas with no resolution.

If the buddha were to say “There is a god” then the logical question is then, who was there before god, and before him, and before him, etc etc. Its a question without an end or a resolution. Its like asking “what was the universe before the universe was formed?”

3) Pat answers cause suffering

when someone gives an answer based on tradition or orthodoxy its not based on experience or testing, its simply the passing on of a corpse from one person to the next. Each person will try to treat the answer like its valid and living, but it will only feel hollow and doubtful. We are too smart to accept this. If we ask “is there a heaven?” we may want to believe with all our hearts, and we may be told exactly what we wish to hear and yet in our minds will always be that doubt, doubt because we know that no one (especially ourselves) can really say with certainty. So we naturally have doubt, unfortunately in most religious if you have doubt then they teach that you are a bad person. Despite the fact that these faiths are full or illogical conjecture you are expected to believe all of it without any question at all, when we (naturally) cant swallow the party line we feel guilt about being  doubtful.

The Buddha didn’t want people to take anything as orthodoxy, one of his final words were “Be you a lamp for your selves”. light your OWN way. He specifically instructed his followers to test the things he taught them and that if they found any of it didn’t match with reality to throw it out. How many religions ask their followers to test them for accuracy?

The Buddha realised on the morning of his enlightenment that we suffer because we are worrying about the wrong stuff. We worry that we don’t have enough money and then if we get some we worry it will go away or that it wont be enough. We worry about what happened in our past or we fret about what might happen in our future. We worry about things being stagnant  and then we worry about change. We worry about being with the right person and then when we are we worry about whether they are really the right person or whether we are their right person. In short, we spend so much time worrying about everything except what is right in front of our face all the time. And what is that?

The real world. The moment each of us occupy right here and now. This very moment has nothing to do with whether we are reincarnated, whether there is a god, whether we have money or a cool car or a hot girl, this very moment the only important thing is to attend to this very moment. Is it washing the dishes? then be in this moment washing the dishes. Are you riding a bus? then be in this moment riding the bus. All that other stuff really is not worth worrying about. In fact it turns out that when we really and truly attend to each moment that those things we worry about stop mattering so much, work out fine, and are taken care of in due course instead of fretting over.

It turns out that all that important stuff we fret over, the big worries are not even worth the effort to agonize over. Even better, it turns out that by taking care of the ‘little’ worries that the big ones are taken care of automatically!  I mean that literally too.Do you want to be taken care of? then care for those around you. Do you want peace? then be peaceful . Do you want to go to heaven? then act in a way that creates heaven right here and now. Do you want to know god? then open your eyes the whole universe and understand that you are a part of it as it is a part of you! the answers aren’t ‘out there” they are (and always were) in you.

‘Cause ya gotta have friennnnnnnds. . . .

I did this mermaid on Caras co-worker, Laura, the other day. Lauras OCD ways were useful to us as we cleaned the shop top to bottom so we could paint the waiting room, I offered to either pay her for the help or tattoo her and she chose the latter. . .

On Lauras thigh, about 7 inches tall

The next day screen printer and bike adviser extraordinaire, Bert, stopped in to fill in some of his rapidly dwindling blank area on his sleeve. We busted out this little beauty in about an hour. . .

Skull moths dont just eat your sweater, they eat your soul!

Fun stuff on friends, its really why I still love tattooing so much. I don’t know if there could be more I could do to make people I care about happy than to tattoo them, its nice to have something to give back.

Its a hell of a town

Its already after midnight now, I should really be in bed already. Still, I’m in one of those fighting sleep moods. My eyes are foggy and keep getting dried out and glazed over, my mouth tastes like pennies, and yet I cant seem to give into sleep.

Its a strange but true fact that sometimes a vacation can feel like more work than my work. Mostly is because I don’t like just sitting around, and my idea of a vacation is running around a new city trying to cram as much fun into a day as possible. Some day i may have to force myself to take a break at a hotel in punxatawny or something, a place where there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no need more pressing than sitting by a pool drinking iced tea and staring at the sky, it sounds nice but i don’t know if I’m really cut out for it. The old zen dudes of yore often described the untrained mind as the ‘monkey mind’ and I definitely feel that shit. Meditation helps, but i have been slack assing on that lately and I need to get back on the stick.

My life has been wonderful lately and I suppose that I don’t feel the pressing urge to sit zazen every day when I’m not freaking out about something. Of course, its clear that this is when I need it the most, you cant really get any closer to the truth if you only run to meditation when the world is tumultuous and scary, its an everyday thing, a baseline for the rest of your day (and life). I need to get on the schedule again, there really is no excuse for not being able to spare 15 minutes of my day for sitting when i will gladly waste hours on this computer.

I suppose I should tell you about new york, Im not sure how actually interesting it is to read about someone elses vacation so let me tell you about some things that occurred to me during vacation without giving you the tedious litany of my daily schedule of our vacation. First of all, Cara is a wonder and a joy, I had some shitty tense moments when we first got there and became testy with everyone around me, some girlfriends would take that as an affront and fire right back, Cara isn’t one of them. She made sure that I understood that she knew I was upset but she also didn’t poor baby me while I was sulking. I snapped out of it shortly thereafter, its hard to be selfish around people who are not, and she definitely is not selfish.

The people we went with, Josh and Erica are amazing. not just nice, but actually amazing people. Nice, funny, up for any adventure, kind and talented. If you dont get to go on vacation with people this awesome then you are missing half the fun. I wish we lived closer than 4 hours from them.

Second, all my fears about new york turned out to be bullshit. No one was rude, no one. People were amazingly helpful and courteous. At no point did I feel in danger and (except for cigarettes) I found the prices to be very much in line with any other large city. I realised that I was enjoying all the stuff i expected to about the city, great food, amazing stores, cool atmosphere, 24 fun without any hassle at all. Here is my only complaint, there was so much to do that I was exhausted at the end of every day!

Third, providence is at work if you allow it to be. We went with only one plan at all, to go to the convention at the roseland ballroom one day, that done we ran into one super cool opportunity after another. We would literally find ourselves being led from one awesome tattoo shop to a fantastic restaurant to an incredible bookstore all with zero planning. Somehow i came away from the city with an invitation to do a guest spot at a top notch shop in july which i will be taking advantage of if i can. It wasn’t planned, the person i met happened to know my brother, the next thing you know I have a place to work in a city i had just fallen in love with. In a city of 8 million people we managed to bump into all the right ones every time. At this point in my life I feel like people who are struggling with their lives are doing so because they haven’t given up trying to control everything. Trust me, it works.

Fourth, no wonder NYC is the home of fixed gear bike-ness, that place is as flat as a board! You could hit one side of Manhattan to the other and never climb a hill or even a small rise. I rode around Pittsburgh this morning and damn near puked hitting unexpected hills and steep fucking climbs. Gears are a waste there and a necessity here.

Lastly, we saw tons and tons of dachshunds and chihuahuas. Obviously little dogs work better in little apartments, but i like to think its had  more to do with being sophisticated and erudite (like me

here’s a few pictures (all the cool trippy ones were taken by Erica Denny):

Cara and i at an insane little indian joint

This place was about the size of a closet, the ceiling was 6 feet high so the ten million chili-pepper lights smacked your head as you squeezed through the place. The food was awesome, the ambiance downright psychedelic, and in a fashion that became routine for us, we managed to get there right before the crowds did and so we got stellar service and left right as it got so crazy that the waiter couldn’t keep up with all the new folk squeezing into this teeny place.

a store called yellow Rat bASTARD. Dumb name, cool store.

The stores were amazing, this joint was blasting crazy dub and underground rap out of huge speakers that all had blown cones, it was so loud that it felt like abuse, and yet a shitload of people just moseyed around like it was the farmers market on a Saturday.

Cara blowing smoke outside the convention

So this was a pretty well attended convention. Cara got a nice rose tattoo by Todd Noble, i got a new Horiyoshi book of his dragons and I got to nervously check out the 50 Hells Angels hanging around supervising the place, they even had a booth selling HA merch. Anyone who thinks that New York doesn’t still have that ‘dont fuck with me’ vibe just isnt looking in the right places.

from L to R; Jason, Tanuki with giant balls, Cara

Outside a Japanese restaurant was an 8 foot tall Tanuki (or raccoon-dog) statue. This place didnt have one sign in English, it was all kanji. Tanukis are portrayed with gigantic balls and are apparently considered quite the friendly fellows in Japan, we followed tradition and cupped his enormous testicles for luck. . . .

Ok enough for now, Im off to bed. tattoo stuff in the next post i promise!

thought for the week and more

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.  Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.  ~Ernest Hemingway

So The Cara-nator and I will be visiting our crazy awesome friends the Dennys in their little town of Delta PA. From there we head to Newark NJ for easy access to NYC. ive never been before and am quite excited. As a kid New York was almost mythically scary to us, every movie and cop show basically implied that to set foot in new york was to invite instant knifing/shooting/raping/and-or haunting (ghostbusters. . .). the funny part is while I was all terrified of ever having to visit the big rotten apple I was living in Miami which was nearly awash in blood from gang and drug running related murders, I guess the palm trees made it seem safer. . . .

I will try to play the tourist and take some pictures, if anyone knows of a super awesome place we HAVE to see while were there let us know, we have 3 days to see stuff and no real firm plans except to attend the Roseland ballroom convention one of those days.

“Mu.” or “Important things”

When Cara has to open the Starbucks she works at she gets up obscenely early, at least to me its obscenely early.  I mean 4:30am IS obscenely early, even if you are some type-A power working hard charger that shit is unnatural. So when I actually roll over at the crack of 7 am its just me and the dog in our apartment. Sometimes Ill just sit there and pet Eddie for 10 or 20 minutes, hes half awake, he just isn’t ready for his busy dog day of barking at birds, chewing bones, and pondering the loss of his testicles. Often some part of my brain (I think its the part on the bottom left) will say something like “You have all this stuff to do, important stuff, forget this dog and go do your important stuff!” There was a time when I probably would have listened, a time when petting a dog didn’t seem as important as taking a shower or going to the bank before work. These day though I dont even pay any attention to that part of my brain, in fact Ill often think that petting a dog might be the most important thing in the world at that moment.

We (humans I mean) have taken a wild animal and played with its genetics and temperament for generations to create these guys, and our Chihuahua,  Eddie, might be the pinnacle of dog manipulation. They can not survive in the wild, the have no “job” like sheep dogs or hunting dogs other than to need and give us constant companionship. They cant pee or poop when they want to or they get in trouble, they cant eat until we let them, they rely on us to be their pack, their life support, and their jailers. Believe me I do consider the fact that I am holding a small living creature hostage in my apartment because it makes me feel good when he is happy to see me (which is always). I’m sure they are happy, we have bred them to be that way.

So when i take 5 or 10 minutes out of my day just to have this little guy laying in the crook of my arm and scratch his chest it feels pretty important. Its my way, I hope, of giving back to this little creature I love and who makes me happy daily. If I can make him feel relaxed and loved and his little grunty noises of satisfaction tell me that I can, then maybe it is ok that we “own” this little living thing.

the grapevine

In Steve Hagens wonderful Book , Buddhism: Plain and simple, he discusses what we call the Eightfold path. A path in the sense of being a way of traveling, in this case instead of distance, its a way of traveling through the world without disturbing its (or your) natural way.

The other day I was reading the section about “Right Speech”, often this is named “enlightened Speech” or “correct speech”, but no matter how you slice it the gist is that our words have both power and consequences. They are a form of action, and like it or not any action has a corresponding result. Despite (or maybe because of) this, that particular fold might be one the hardest of the eight to stick to.

To not lie seems the obvious point of Right speech, but there is a lot more to it than just that, a lie is a statement that the speaker knows to be false. Its a conscious attempt to mislead the listener. But What is gossip? What is praise? What if what is said is hurtful but still ‘the truth”? In his book Hagen uses an example something like this, If Bill tells you some gossip about Suzy, our usual reaction is to feel that we have learned something about Suzy. But have we? According to Buddhism we haven’t actually experienced anything for certain regarding Suzy, instead what we have really learned is something about Bill. Regardless of Bills intent, good or bad, he has shown us something about himself.

Early in my tattooing career i had not yet formed the thick skin or calm mind of my later years, and in this business (especially back then) your competition constantly shit talked you. I would hear from customers every day about this or that tattooer having said I sucked, was a junky, a nazi, a rock star, unclean, expensive, and much more. None of this was true, but I was being told that other tattooers in town were spreading these tales and I used to get upset by this and a few times thought about barging into this shop or another and blasting the supposed shit-talker in the mouth. However, the more I got used to it and the more I examined the situation i realised that the real “bad guys” weren’t the people supposedly saying these things about me, it was the people bringing me the news! Why did these “friends” insist on telling us that people said horrible things about us day in and day out? I finally understood that these messengers wanted us to feel that they were “on our side” and they they were providing us a service with this ’spying’. i suppose the idea was that we would be so grateful that they would get a free tattoo or at least the pleasure of watching us get riled up by this “news” they had brought.

Soon i would cut these guys off and simply say “If i don’t hear it firsthand then it didn’t happen.” Within weeks these formerly ‘loyal’ hang-out guys disappeared. Without our angry reaction and without the made up conflict for entertainment, bringing us gossip lost its luster. Soon we would see them hanging out at other shops. It was a revelation and a lesson I never forgot. It also made me examine my own motives for repeating news about another person. Why, I wondered, was I so eager to share some tidbit or bad news about someone else? Why did I think that my opinion of someone else was so important that I had to tell other people this stuff?

I didn’t like the answer very much. It turned out that I liked feeling important, that I was a know-it-all and that knowing everyones business made me feel like I had some kind of power or control over the world. It was my way of trying to be a big shot.

Try a little experiment some day. Wake up and resolve not to talk about anyone who isn’t right there in the room with you for a whole day. Nothing good or bad, not praise or shittalk. No discussion of another that isn’t absolutely necessary. Ive done it and guess what, its really hard to do! Until you make a conscious effort to not do i,t its amazing how much we do it without knowing!

Now think of the people you most enjoy being around, Id be willing to bet that most of them are the ones who don’t gossip or badmouth people, even if you agree with them there is something unpleasant about being around that kind of talk. Its like being stuck in a room with a bad smell, you dont only sense it in your nose, but you feel like its permeating your very skin and clothes. Gossip is the same way, it carries a stain into your mind. But it doesn’t have to.

I’m really trying to keep my mouth shut these days unless I have something appropriate to say. Even the hard truths can be brought out without sounding like a jerk. In fact they are far more likely to be appreciated if they aren’t delivered with anger or smugness.

Right Speech isn’t just about lies or gossip. its about bringing your conscious mind into every conversation and wondering “is what im about to say furthering harmony or destroying it?”