Bike love

stolen from the Bike Snob. . .

Suffer this! the second noble truth.

It took me a long time to realise that there didn’t have to be suffering in the world. I dont mean like in some hippy utopian vision where everything is the ‘way it should be”, I’m talking right here and right now among all the war and cruelty and death in the world. I’m not speaking in metaphor or mysterious zen-magic talk either, I mean exactly this:  despite all the pain that exists in the world that suffering is optional.

When I began looking at things in my life that statement seemed like a pile of shit, and when I began looking at things in others lives (who had it worse than me) that statement seemed like a pile of shit and a cruel joke on top of that. After all, anyone who has lost a loved one or been a victim of violence or suffered accidents and the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” will tell you that suffering happens to you and there is no choice about it! Suffering is something inflicted upon us, we believe, and beyond our ability to stop. So when the Buddha said that we suffer because of our attachments (or desires, or cravings, or thirst or however you want to describe it) it certainly sounds as though he was telling us that it is somehow our fault that we suffer! What a jerk!

Once I began to really look at life though it became clear that the universe itself wasn’t causing me suffering, it was my relationship to the universe that was. I spent most of my life feeling like I never had enough. I always wanted things, things like toys or friends or cool clothes when I was young and then things like girls or coolness or money when I was older and after 30 some years of torturing myself with those cravings I just began to want peace and happiness and love. I wanted, I thirsted, i craved and so. . . like the Buddha dude said I would. . . ,I suffered. So do we stop wanting anything? Is such a thing even possible?

Buddhism and the Second noble truth are not about cutting off your natural desires as some have claimed, Buddhism and the second noble truth are about understanding that these natural desires are not facts. Its about changing your relationship to the world so that you can feel the very natural emotion of “I want to eat all that cake” without being mad at yourself for the desire and without actually eating all the chocolate cake and without being upset that you cant have all the cake.  Its about understanding the paradox of craving.

When you want something, and it doesn’t matter what that something is, you begin suffering. It can literally be something as silly as a new pair of socks or as serious as the desire to not have cancer anymore. The majority of the time though, it isn’t as serious as cancer, the majority of the time its fame, money, power, sex or some version of them that we crave. For this example lets say what we crave is money.

We might cover that desire under the guise of wanting to be safe from homelessness or the desire to give money to a charity, but the root is that we want money. As soon as we feel like we don’t have enough money the suffering begins. How can we get it? Why does he have it and I don’t? Can I take his and get away with it? Can I get it easily? Suffering suffering suffering. The paradox is that even  if we do get the object of our desire, we still suffer! Is the money we got enough? Can we keep it? Can we get more? How do we keep him from taking our money? What if the money runs out!? Suffering suffering suffering. As if that wasn’t a big enough kick in the balls; it turns out that the things we really think we want turn out not to satisfy anyway! Haven you ever wanted a really cool jo The whole time you just knew that if you had it everything would be awesome! Then you get it and it turns out that the boss is a jerk, the coworkers shiftless boobs, and the money not nearly enough for all the work you put in. What happened!?? What happened is that the fantasy, the dream image of what you wanted could not live up to the reality that exists. it never can! Good or bad your mind can make any situation seem impossibly wonderful or horrible to a degree that reality just can not live up to! I cant tell you how many of my customers get up from their first tattoo and say “wow, that wasn’t nearly as bad as I imagined!” Because reality can never ever be ‘what you imagined’, that’s the very definition of imagination!

Just looking at the number of crazy eccentric billionaires who are miserable and kooky should tell you that. In a way it must be worse than being poor, after all you got everything that people are supposed to want and here you are still suffering! Why did Micheal Jackson buy the elephant mans bones? Probably because they were so unique and expensive that it was one of the few things left to want that he couldn’t just have with the wave of a check-book.  Id be willing to bet that as soon as he got those bones home he looked at them for a minute, closed the lid and never thought about them again. He still suffered, and so would you are me, even with a billion million dollars.

Even with everything we have ever wanted.

The problem isn’t the “everything”, its the “wanted”. The second truth is there to point out that the suffering in your life is not a requirement. Pain may be something no one can escape if they are alive, but suffering is always and completely something you opt into. From the day we are born we are creatures of want, all our lives that natural desire is fed and stoked by our families, communities, and social world. A person who isn’t motivated by desire is seen as strange, perhaps even sinister. We design our entire world around want and desire and to the day we die we that next thing, then the next thing, then the next thing. And believe me Zen folk are not immune, they may want things like sex or money less than the average frat boy (or maybe not. . .) but we crave enlightenment (even if we don’t believe in it. . .ahem), or we sit in zazen and wish our nose didn’t itch or that we could ‘do it right’ or we wish we could find that awesome cool teacher who could with a wave of his robe make everything clear and easy about Buddhism. Craving is both powerful and insidious.

So when the Buddha understood the truth of suffering he realised what a big job it was to end suffering. One story holds that he was so stunned by what he understood that he didn’t move or speak for 7 days. Id be willing to bet that most of that time he was thinking something along the lines of “those fuckers are never gonna be willing to give up desiring so much.” But he also saw that it was the one and only way out of suffering. He also saw that with a lot of hard work and compassion that it was possible.

But that’s the next truth.

Grumpy old man list

Im not really grumpy (or even that old. . .I think) but some things sound more profound if they come from a grizzled veteran. In all honesty I think of myself as more of a grilled veteran than a grizzled one. . but anyway, we have  LISTS!

.1  there is only one way to accomplish anything in the world. Be it losing weight, becoming proficient at a skill, learning anything. There is no short cut, there is no quick way and there is no ‘natural talent’ that will make up for. . . work. Hard work. Hard repetitive, boring work. The plain fact is that for whatever reason the universe decided that for everything you get out of this life you must put something back in, in equal measure and with equal grace. Im sorry but years of caring a lot, worrying a lot, visualising, anger, desperation, cynicism wont get you even one tenth of what a few hours of hard work/practice will. The good news is that when you do earn whatever it is you have been striving for there is more than just the joy of accomplishment, there is pride of craftsmanship. In the end, it turns out that what you really wanted isnt half so pleasurable as what you went through to earn it.

.2 Smoking pot really is destructive. I didnt used to think so, in fact i used to believe (still do actually) that it would be far better to legalise marijuana and ban alcohol. I dont do drugs myself, but Ive lived long enough to meet several 40 and 50+ year olds who have smoked weed daily and while they are not the wreckage of human life that a daily drinker is, they are all. . .well. . .dopey. Its kind of sad to watch these folks i know and respect wandering through life like an ox someone brained with an ax handle. Glassy-eyed and with the mental and physical reaction time of a tree sloth these folks have one calamity after another befall them (i.e. real life) with their only ability to deal with it in the form of a forlorn “aw maaaan, that sucks.” What is so insidious is how gradually this toporific trance sneaks up on them, after years of toking up they slowly morph from laid back jesters to sprawled out Hutts. Pot, it turns out isnt necessarily a gate way to hard drugs, its a gateway to a stinky apartment, 3 months of unpaid bills, and the complete inability to do anything even remotely proactive about .. . anything.

.3 What your brain predicts  is seldom, if ever, what happens. Your worst fears turn out to not be quite so bad and your fondest goals turn out to be a let down. What you want most in the world doesnt seem to satisfy and your darkest fear reveals itself to be just another turn your brain poops up. Its almost like real life doesnt even care what you and I think. its like real life is somehow always in the middle of our percieved highs and lows. if only there was some way to walk in the middle, to take some kind of middle path as it were. But what does this ‘middle way’ look like. . . . . ? Oh well i guess we’ll never know.

.4 Driving a car seems to have a magical effect on people. otherwise calm, rational folks turn into ranting juvenile assholes as soon as they close that door. Ive seen road rage incidents countless times and the common denominator is always the same, as soon as the person steps out of their car (or someone reaches in and pops them in the mouth) they get this stunned look like, “hey where did my power go!?  Just a second ago i was king of the world and now some skinny bike rider guy has rearranged my bicuspids with a u-lock. . . ” I imagine its sort of how a hermit crab would geel if you popped him out of his shell, all the sudden his soggy weak ass is hanging for the world to see. A car, it seems, is like giving everyone in the world a suit of armor and a gun, despite the bizarre utopia the NRA espouses it turns out that giving any idiot over the age of 16 the means to drive over other people doesn’t result in a ‘polite society” but instead a nation of childish hatred and insularity. Ride a bike for a week and I promise you will feel like the only sane person left on the planet.

.5 Language is, at best, a way to convey the wondrous complexity of the universe into a form that, hopefully, can inform another of your particular unique experience without the need for them to actually share your brain. In person language can do this tolerably well because the words themselves are given life via tone, volume, gesture, timing, bearing and all the other tiny things that make a face to face conversation so compelling. Some writers can do nearly as well with the written word, though even the best wordsmiths can only convey half of what any live person can in a few spoken lines. So when you then take that incomplete experience and compress it further into texting or email you lose all but the simplest factual information and even that reads as somehow mysterious and arcane. If you have ever had an argument or disagreement viea text or email you can attest to how it is nearly useless to try to convey anything! One ends up being more frustrated at the fact that your point is simply misunderstood than whatever the argument was about! At the same time we humans find it much eaier to be douche-bags via the typed word then in person. In my own life I have tried to institude the 2 text rule, if what we are discussing requires the both of us to text more than twice then its time for a phone call instead.

How people find us. . .

one of wordpress’ neato bits is a list of the phrases people put in search engines to get here. Usually its stuff that appears in my posts, stuff like “tradional tattoo” or “black cats”, sometimes its specific like “Trek Soho S bike” or ” zen tattoos”. And sometimes, they are just fucking hilarious.

heres a few recent ones, I really hope these people found something they liked based on these search engine terms they entered.

badass tattoos for guys

bad ass rose tattoos

sick black tattoo sleeve

how did they use to tattoo on the old day

am i too fat to ride a bicycle

steak tattoo

stylish cat tattoo

walking tall tattoo upper arm the rock

tatto shop for dummies

tattoo owl with attitude

tattoo ass

tibet pants

shit berries

Now if you will excuse me I have to go put my tibet pants on. . .

The good news is that All life is suffering

The irony is that when we most crave stability and routine is when we cant have it. For the last month Ive been going crazy trying to get the shop open, watching a million fires and stamping out the ones which pose an immediate danger and stoking up the ones threatening to go out entirely. Its no different than billions of peoples lives every day, but for me this was an unusual amount of chaos. As a result I haven’t sat in meditation for weeks.

It shows.

For one thing I can literally feel my compassion and connection with the world changing, I find a run far more “scenarios” in my mind where I’m telling this or that person off, defending myself from imagined slights and attacks, and basically being a little quicker to anger and a little less likely to measure my words and actions. Fortunately its not like years of sitting have been erased over the course of a couple weeks. Far from it! In fact one of the benefits of all those years is the awareness of what I’m experiencing! Very few people want to be assholes (or suffering, if I have to get all Buddhist about it.), the great majority simply don’t know they are, or how they could stop hurting themselves because they are not aware there even is a problem. The 4 ‘noble’ truths are so short and so simple that many of us move right on past them after our first introduction to Buddhism. I know I did.

But they are incredibly important to be conscious of, in fact I found the first truth so important that I have it tattooed across both my hands.

All life is suffering.

by the way, lots of folks feel that that translation doesn’t carry the true nuances of what the Buddha meant, so they will say the same thing as “Suffering occurs” or “In life there is dissatisfaction”. But Ive always been partial to the more direct and punk rock sounding version. Some folks hear that and immediately assume that Buddhism is nihilism or pessimistic and fatalistic. As if Gautama (the Buddha) said “Life is suffering, oh well, I suppose that I had better go organise my Smiths records now. . . ” But the truth of Suffering is only the first truth, ole Buddha boy spent the next 4 decades of his life finding ways to end that suffering and came up with a way that doesn’t rely on anything but the stuff you came into the world with. No outside extras are necessary (and eventually you figure out there is no “outside” that isn’t you “inside” anyhow. . . ). When I see the words  “ALL life if suffering” I don’t take that “ALL” to mean that life is always and forever suffering, I take it to mean that Suffering occurs in my life AND your life . In my dogs life AND in the coral reefs life , in the president AND the moose in Saskatoon. ALL life means ALL life. Its only our egos that want to make that into something that says “mean ole Buddha said that My life is permanently full of suffering”, that’s not what the Buddha-man was saying. He was talking about everything and everyone, not just you (or me).

So the first truth is that suffering occurs. Its so important that Gautama didn’t add anything else to that first truth. Its so important that he said “LOOK at what I’m saying here. Even if you love your life, have a billion dollars, AND a harem of nymphomaniacs the fact is, pal, that suffering occurs!” Ask any drug addict or doctor, any abused wife or movie star and all of them will say some version of “I’m a happy person on the inside, but these terrible things happen to me and make me unhappy” Even that dumb redneck in a ford 150 yelling at you out of the window is human, and therefore, suffers. The fact that he is yelling out of his truck at you probably is an indication that he is suffering a great deal. The problem of the dumb redneck, the movie star, the addict and you and me cant be addressed until we first accept that we suffer. Its not easy!

No one wants to admit ‘weakness’ and admitting that life as we live it is basically unsatisfying seems to be the biggest weakness of all! Like Lao Tzu once said in his book, the Tao Te Ching, “everyone else seems so bright and clever! Only I seem dull and simple. Everyone walks straight and surely! only i seems cautious and tentative.” We compare our lives to how we perceive others and believe that they are free of suffering and only we are so sad and miserable. So we try to appear satisfied, we try to appear confident and strong when we feel small and scared. If we do this long enough we begin to believe our own fiction. Mostly.

Mostly, but not wholly. Our true selves know the real deal and the real deal is not up for discussion or compromise. the real deal wont be covered, convinced, or camouflaged. The real deal does whatever it wants and we can align ourselves with its natural flow and admit that suffering occurs because that’s a natural part of existing, or we can try to go against it. But that only causes more suffering. So our true selves know we are bullshitting and when that image of our lives mashes up against the reality of our lives there is friction, there is suffering. That redneck in the pick up probably has a ton of imagery slapped over his true self, so much that he cant let any of his real being show and he is miserable as shit. He might be married to Sally-Sue but really wants to be married to Jim Billy Bob at work. He might want to be soothed by calm jazz music and an nice episode of ‘what not to wear’  but instead he has to get shit-faced down at the Buckaroos Bar and fight his brother in law on the front lawn. He might be living one theatrical set-piece after another and never ever know why life just always seems so goddamn shitty. That’s why the first noble truth is so important.

In the deep treatise on philosophical existentialism known as “PeeWees Big Adventure” , Peewee meets a waitress working in a south western shithole town who dreams of going to Paris.  Simone (the waitress) dreams of it, has learned french, talks all day about Paris but she is still in that shithole town. Finally, peewee basically tells her that all her wanting and dreaming of Paris is useless unless she gets off her ass and goes to Paris. She has the tools to go, but she doesn’t know why she isn’t there yet. The first noble truth tells us that “Hey! there IS a problem. its NOT just you. Its not just in YOUR brain, and is going to go on as long as you EXIST because the very nature of existence includes suffering!” The rest of the truths spell out why we suffer, that there is a solution, and the way to end suffering, but without the first truth we wont even understand that we need the other 3.

Its not really the first ‘truth’, its the first step on a much happier road.

recycle

So here are some pics of the shop as it used to be. Keep in mind that there was a shitty 200 year old bath tub in the restroom ans that the back station didn’t have the flooring that is in these pictures. these were also taken after most of the demolition was done, it looked a lot worse!

this would become my room

the waiting room/caras station to be

the view from the waiting room area into caras future station

the view into Black cat before remodel

the place a bath tub lived before I killed and skinned it and after my brother Brandon added the new plumbing

looking into what would become my station after Dan and I (mostly Dan) installed the floor

So after all that My good friend Jason and his buddy Bobby build the walls for Caras station and the half-wall for the waiting room. Then Mica and his crew painted the place. These pictures are when we got the construction finished but before any furniture and art was in the place.

the view into my station

what you see when you first walk in

the waiting room looking into Caras station

the other side of the waiting room

my station looking into Caras station

We have moved in and said goodbye to North Craig street, Ive already been tattooing for 3 days in the new place and it feels amazing. Its positively a joy to come to work, my customers have told me they feel more comfortable and the shop feels happy and creative.

I absolutely could not have done this without Jason, Bobby, Brandon, Dan V, my folks, Caras folks, Dan V 2.0, Dan A, Thommy, Lindsey, and most of all Cara (who didn’t ask for any of this craziness and still stepped up and helped a ton while balancing an insane workload at her ‘real’ job and my stressed out wack-i-tude.) If i didnt already know this would have taught me how much other people are the miracle in our lives! THANK YOU!