"You want the scars, but you don't want the war / That's just hardcore. / These kids are clever to the core."
-"Chicks Like Status," b-side, The Hold Steady
These three lines can be taken several different ways. They may mean, "You want to look tough, but you can't handle the fight." They may also mean, "You want to fight and get scars but you're opposed to fighting" (The War in title case, maybe).
The image of a tattoo comes to mind in either case. A tattoo is a scar you get without fighting. It's self-inflicted, too, which means the bearer had to make some specific decisions to get it.
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An acquaintance of mine has many frightening tattoos on his biceps. He also has no body fat to speak of, and he's written about starving himself to look beautiful. He worked for a famous and highly intellectual publication for some years. He chews gum manically and speaks in a clipped tone.
Because of his connections to the New York publishing circuit, he's often invited to such fancy wine-and-cheese events as I occasionally attend. He wears wifebeaters and skin-tight pants to these functions. In short, he looks wholly different from just about all the slouching, tall, thin boys who are also in attendance. The tattoos are on prominent display. He talks for a couple minutes to friends but cuts conversations short to talk to women at length.
His tattoos basically say, "If you're bored with the boys you'd meet here, you might want to try me out instead."
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My coworkers this week asked me about my haircut. I'd flip-flopped facial for head, meaning I chopped of my longish thinning mess and let my beard grow out for a couple days. One person told me I should shave.
"Haven't you heard the Aesop fable about the cat who shaves his whiskers to look handsome?"
"No, what are you talking about."
"It killed his reflexes and he couldn't catch any mice."
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Several times this week I got the wrong change from the vending machine. One time, a Coke only cost 45 cents. Another, someone had deposited a quarter in the machine without completing the transaction, so I put a dollar in and got 75 cents back.
A vending machine with only one quarter in it. Did the person run out of money? Get distracted? Or just forget that he was there for a soda and move on with his life?
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When I lived in New Hampshire, from ages four to seven, I had a forest for a backyard. There was an abandoned maple house out in the forest, and some older boys and I would go out there with wood they took from their fathers, some hammers, and nails, and try to fix up the maple house so we could use it to plan adventures. I took my dad out there one time, and I think he told the older boys' parents where their hammers and nails had gone off to.
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I was drinking coffee in the park this afternoon. A father walked with his son, and the son climbed to the top of a green cement thing that looked like a defunct water fountain. When he got to the top of the thing he did a "Suck It!" hand gesture a couple times and then jumped off.
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In a book called Arkansas I read recently, a main character, Svin, gets a plus sign and a minus sign tattooed on each shoulder. That's a pretty corny move.
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I'm still learning the ropes and rules of professionalism.
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Last night I attended a standup comedy performance hosted by kids who had attended college together. I thought it was funny, but at the end the emcee apologized "for all the inside jokes." Now I'm not so sure it was really funny.
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I took a cab home from midtown last night.
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I made a promise to myself when I was 17 that I would not change certain things about myself, but I've forgotten since what was so important to me at the time.
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I watched The Cable Guy (with Jim Carrey, not Larry the Cable Guy) today.
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In other countries, people put Alhamdoulilah on the sides of their taxi cabs. I think that they do this so that they'll be protected from crashes. In America, some people put pictures or statues of saints on their dashboards to protect them. I wonder if hanging dice in the mirror is just a more mathematical or casino-oriented version of that idea.
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I saw "The Kiss," by Gustav Klimt, and I think it's my favorite painting.
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A friend of mine has a good joke on his away message most of the time: "Fool me 34 times, shame on you."
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At the comedy show, one guy did some lefty songs with small jokes in them about how scarily conservative Mike Huckabee is. His voice actually sounded at times like that of Phil Ochs, one of my favorite protest singers. But after the show when we went out to drinks my friends and I were all pretty mad that he'd done political humor. His songs were pretty cheesy.
Phil Ochs has a good song about that feeling, called "Love Me, I'm a Liberal."
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I was reminded today of a man who'd frequent the bar in Tacoma. He was old and had been in the navy. He remembered those days fondly, saying that he and his buddies would just party all the time when he was younger. He was one of those drunks who has a life philosophy to share, at length. The kind of life philosophy that winds its way in circles and includes phrases as "We're all different," and "But we all gotta live together." Also a lot of curses.
Another talkative customer was Three Finger Jack, former owner of the Tides Tavern who eventually became Tacoma's most famous street performer. He played guitar, sang, and sold CDs outside performing arts centers and would live off whatever people would throw at him. On his strumming hand, he was missing three fingers but could still hold a pick. He had contempt for homeless people that begged him for money after he finished playing. "I work for this," he said.
Another customer with a deformity was named Dave. He had written songs for some famous performers in the 1980s and was living off the royalties and making more by continuing to make modestly successful solo albums. He was born with a deformed right arm that was frozen crooked at the elbow. He didn't have a forearm but had a small, thin hand shaped like a mitten nestled right into the crook. The day I met him, I held out my right hand for him to shake. He grabbed it firmly in his mitten-hand and looked me right in the eye. I admired him for that, but when he stopped tipping me after a couple of weeks I got tired of seeing him.
The last customer I'm going to write about right now was a single mother who came into the bar after being kicked out of one down the street. She was hammered and had been fighting with someone, maybe an ex boyfriend, and was sitting at our bar either hiding or waiting for a ride. The cook got off work and began buying her drinks. She showed me a picture of her eight-year-old girl then gave me a kiss on the forehead before falling off the stool and showing the owner's girlfriend a tattoo on her inner thigh.
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Crack! Goes the Bat.
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Another painting I really like:
"Mont Sainte Victoire" by Cezanne.
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In Children of Men, the hippies are right, for once, about the need for revolution, but they still seem crazy to the regular people going about their business. The people who stand the best chance of tearing down injustice may want to replace it with something unreasonable or stupid, but that doesn't make them wrong about current evils. It makes me wonder if at some point we'll need to listen to the people on the fringes and start throwing rocks.
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I've started listening to Soundgarden again, specifically "Pretty Noose." In high school, a friend talked about how surprising Kim Thayil's tremolo picking was on that solo. "Surprising."
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I ordered some new trucks for my skateboard.
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A French poet named Georges Perec one time sat in a cafe at Saint Sulpice and tried to write down every possible thing that happened in that spot for a given span of time. He'd note the time of each event. First liveblogger.
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A guy I knew who dealt drugs once had a gun in his face. He lived, but he bought a gun after that.
I don't buy guns.
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