"Pottery Snob"

     So, as some of you know, I bought an old kick-powered pottery wheel the other day. It's just a simple wooden frame with a balanced stone wheel laid flat, that you kick and spin the pottery wheel attached on top. Very simple, very cool.

     Little did I know that with this purchase, I would enter the world of one of the most persnickety and least known secret societies ever constructed. The Order of the Pottery Snob.

     The gentleman I got the wheel from seemed innocuous enough and maybe that was to plan. The actual acquiring of said wheel was easy, but I had no idea what was involved in procuring supplies or even making it work. Secrets so tightly guarded, that one would have to brave the web of ambiguous, hobby-specific, clerk jargon, just to get started.

     First of all, I had no idea that the pottery aristocracy elite, was centered here in Seattle. But I probably should have guessed that it was. Every other hippie-dippy pursuit you can dream up while taking glass rips and eating Fruit Loops is championed here, why not ceramics? But a lot of those really seemed cool. The whole descending chain of uber-underground music, that you have to know, to know, to know about, resides here; and I get that, it's Seattle. But music ain't pots and I was about to find out that that didn't matter to these folks. I was an outsider and unwanted.

     I'd been an outsider before. As a tattooer, I'm placed squarely outside the box in polite society's view, but even so, retain a certain 'cool factor' that usually gets me a pass into hard to access factions like the pot snobs. Not so here. From the minute my daughter and I walked in to the pottery mega-store with a 'Skull and Bones' feel, the icy reception was palpable.

     "...and I couldn't believe she said that, and I was all, and she was all, and I was like..."

(clerk talks to co-worker as we stand right in front of them) Finally:

     "Did you need something?"

     "No, I'm just waiting for a bus." (Is what I should have said.)

     "Yes, we just got a kicking wheel and we needed some clay." Oddly enough, I somehow thought the fact that we had this arcane technology of the kick-powered wheel, might actually garner some respect for, I don't know, being green and extra hip? Not so. Apparently it put us in line with protruding-browed cave-dwellers, at or around the advent of fire. 

     "What kind of clay?" What kind? I don't know, the kind for a Jurassic Era pottery wheel I guess.

     "I don't know, do you have a main seller that most people use?" 

     "Well, it depends on what temperature you're going to fire at and what glazes you're going to use. If you're using stoneware clays then you..." At this point she starts going into some really specific referencing that I clearly don't understand and is fairly miffed that afterward, I still don't know what I want.

     After some heavy breathing and shared eye-rolling with her co-workers, she reluctantly came from behind the counter and showed us to some clay that was undoubtedly the stuff she sells to teachers for their third-graders. She then sold us some glazes we could put on with our fingers, and then offered a parting shot when asked how much it was to have things fired in their kiln.

     "Well, you'll probably just have like, a little bowl and a couple of mugs, so, like four bucks." 

     'A little bowl and a couple of mugs' huh? I don't know that we'll have time for more than one mug, what with the NASCAR schedule and the wrestling tickets we just got. 

     "You bumpkins have a good time makin' a mess back at the trailer now, ya hear!"

     I was now positioned to fabricate the most amazing porcelain candy dishes and fine china one could imagine. Just to show this squat, potato sack of a man-lady with a bad haircut, what us 'bumpkins' could do.

     So, guess how good it feels to figure out the warthog back at pottery supply was right and that this shit is crazy hard and probably not for everyone? Yeah, not great. That fucken bitch was laughing at us and I knew it. It was then that I realized what I had to do. No, not burn down pottery supply. Not yet. I needed to become the greatest ceramics artist of our time. (cue eye-rolling from my wife.) But it fucken kills me that these pottery elitists would make us feel like slack-jawed peons while we suckled at the teat of pottery knowledge. 

    So, I am resigned to watching as many YouTube tutorials as necessary and making a big fucken mess on the deck, until the day when I can raise my hand (hopefully with a really cool mug in it.) and say,

   "I too, am a Pottery Snob!"