"Fashionbot"

     Fashion is a funny thing. No one leaves the house without considering it and yet a lot of modern fashion is centered on looking like you don't. The disheveled hipster look, for example. Very bohemian, very cavalier and meticulously put together. Almost everything is an oxymoron these days, disguised as 'ironic' fashion. I wish I could have some fucking stupid idea and convince people it's cool. Wait, I've done that. Well, the first part anyway; I'm not sure what magic has to happen for the second part, but I'm working on it.


     You can tell a lot about a person from their fashion sense, or their lack of it. Most people experiment with different looks in school and then settle on some genre of dress, somewhere in their twenties. If you want to know what someone was like when they were younger, look at how they're dressed. 


   The Midline:
     
     These are the 'I get my shit at Target and don't really have a style' people. They look alright for polite society, but aren't out shakin' up the world. They were probably a little dry when they were young and are still stuck in a midline vanilla existence. They are aware of fashion, but somehow feel it doesn't apply to them.


   The Metalhead:


     The, 'I still wear Iron Maiden T-shirts and not in an ironic hipster way' guy. This guy was probably not steeped in academia in his school days, but did alright in a few shop classes. He works with his hands, has nine kids and enjoys a good race. 
     P.S. Any women with this fashion sense should be married to some dude in a meth lab, or reconsider their style immediately.


   The Hipster:


     The hipster is one of my favorite animals to study. They roam free in my city, unwashed and unchecked by the rules of polite society. Their format of dress is supposed to denote an air of apathetic aloofness, but there are specific rules that must be adhered to, or you will simply be dismissed as a kook. (It's a fine line.) Let's start at the bottom.
   
     Shoes. Usually Tom's, 'yes I'm wearing my sister's shoes and somehow that's okay.' Your father must be thrilled.


     Skinny jeans. Skinny jeans are cool. If you're a hot chick. They are most certainly not cool, if you are a boy and decidedly not cool if you are a full grown man. Jeans so tight they could give you a heart arrhythmia, are not okay. 


     Shirts. Shirts should be comfortable. If you put on a shirt and it squeezes all your pudge into little bundles, so you resemble a potato sack; find a different shirt. And I get the whole retro thing, but resurrecting something from the dead, doesn't necessarily make it cool. Haven't you seen Pet Cemetery?


     Finally, head gear. Please don't wear knit wool caps in the summer heat. You're making my head sweat just looking at you. Besides, you'll fog up your giant glasses.


   The Suit: 


     The business attire set. These folks used to be cool. Used to be. Now, they have just become conformists. Stuffed into starched shirts and German metal coffins, their only release is a few over-priced cocktails on the weekend and wearing women's jeans with square-toed shoes. You're not cool anymore. No one thinks your cool. You just look rich and douchey.


   The Punk


     These people are close to my heart. They are weirdos to be sure, but they possess a freedom known only to them and children. Kids are very PunkRock. They have a certain 'yeah, I'm wearing Spider-Man pajamas at the store, you gotta fucken problem with that?' attitude. I like that. They don't give a shit whether your fascist ass understands or not. That's what fashion is supposed to do. Make a statement and set you apart. Nowadays, people are spoon-fed their fashion from T.V. and media. How are you unique and different, when you're wearing someone else's uniform?


     So, as New York's fashion week comes to an end, I hope you'll all give them a big F U, and go buy a new outfit at the Salvation Army.


     Today's program has been brought to you by: Dickies Work Pants. Making mechanics and tough guys look cool since 1918.

"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!"

Run Log

My running log.

fresh pots

Kicking wheel, day one.

"Time to Opine"

http://fuckengenius.tumblr.com/

 Today’s show is brought to you by:

LOUSY BASTARD SOAP  ”Don’t live like that, wash that Lousy Bastard!”

     As we rejoin the show, we find that no one gives a shit about your opinion. Let’s listen in.

     It has been my experience that nobody is listening much anymore. Everyone is just waiting for their turn to talk and while you’re talking, they’re only thinking about what they want to tell you. So there seems to be a lot of hot gases blowing about, but not a lot of information being passed on. Not that anyone has had anything interesting to say for quite some time; and maybe that’s why everyone has stopped listening. But I don’t think so.

     I think what’s been happening is that, in this YouTube world of ours, everyone thinks they have something to contribute and it’s all worthy of our attention. And in the land of ‘post what you ate for lunch’ there is serious questionability about what constitutes quality content. I like staying in touch with friends; I do. But I think if we’re going to engage in a global conversation, we should bring some decent fodder to the table.

     Not everything has to be a political diatribe on current tensions in Washington. (Don’t get me fucking started.) But I’m afraid that if everyone talks at once, what little relevant conversation there is, will be drowned out and lost in the white noise. 

     People don’t want to talk about real issues anymore. And God forbid if you try and have a conversation with someone who doesn’t share your beliefs. Forget it. So the circles of debate get increasingly smaller and after a while, we’re all just kind of preaching to the choir. If you only share opinions with people that already share your opinions, then there’s not really much dialogue going on is there? 

     I hate to think that the Internet has somehow just given a larger microphone to the obnoxious and loud, but it seems that way. Used to be, you had to be mildly amusing or an expert of some sort to warrant a large audience. Not anymore. Step right up and hog-tie some bandwidth with your mindless drivel! Anyone can do it; and they are! 

     I feel that especially in this country right now, the true populous has lost its voice. The fringe has taken center stage with its media circus and it’s time we wrested it back. So please, if you possess half a brain and have read a book at any point in your life, help me quiet the unwashed masses so our children won’t have to battle the machines and Dick Cheney for control of the planet. Thank you.     

"Positioning"

     Status is a funny thing. In this country especially, we are made aware of it and it's implications, at a very early age. There is hierarchy within the family: parental, parent to child, as well as parent to parent; and sibling status within the group. A lot of dynamics, all playing off one another and all having something to do with the status each individual enjoys out in the world, separately from the group.

      Status at school. If you didn't have it, you were acutely aware of that fact and even if you thought you had it, it's only fucken high school, it doesn't really count. College might be another story, but when you're in college everyone is busy blowing smoke up your ass, telling you what a bright and special flower you are, so it isn't very realistic.


     Yes, you only truly know what the world thinks of you once you leave the bubble; and it isn't very much, trust me. My grandfather used to say, 
   "Don't take yourself too seriously, nobody else does." I have only recently clued in to how accurate a statement this is. But it takes a long time to realize how ultimately impotent and mediocre you are in the cosmic scheme of things. No one would ever leave the nest without the requisite hubris and over-blown sense of self. It's only a few thousand kicks in the teeth later, that you realize why old guys move so slow. There's no fucking hurry. From dust whence you came, so too shall you return. 

      But there is some living to do in the meantime and to be even marginally successful at it, you need some God damned positioning. And lest you forget that every other swingin' dick in the territory is jockeying for position himself, we now have the aid of mass media to constantly remind us. Women: you'd better be beautiful. (forget smart, that shit's overrated.) Men: you'd better be rich. (and good looking if you want to spend some of that money on a woman.) Everyone: Be fit. Be rich. Be good looking. Be a perfectly shaped, independently wealthy, underwear model that eats vegan food paste made from sustainable green fuel.

     What a perfectly shaped ball of shit. Does anyone care if you're nice to people anymore? Do they care if you have respect for your elders and family? Do they care if you are truly a good person at heart? Pfft, are you kidding?!? Of course they fucking don't! Mother Theresa was a beautiful person. Ghandi was an amazing man. I've never once heard of anyone telling their children to be like either one of them. Michael Jordan made more money than God, by playing a game and being a giant self-centered prick. Just so he and his father could drive sports cars, drink all night, gamble and dick whores. There are countless parents nation-wide, women and men, that would kill to have their kids be exactly like him.

      My point is, in this massive struggle for supremacy we have going on out in the world today, how do we expect people to be able to differentiate between the necessary amount of confidence one needs to be able to effectively bring home the bacon and an amount that bleeds out over the family and can color an entire lifetime with resentment and despair. Success at the cost of family and friends isn't much of a success. At the end of the day, things are just things and while some money is needed to live and definitely can make things more comfortable; I don't think that amassing huge amounts of wealth is necessarily a guarantee of true happiness. David Lee Roth said,
   "Money can't buy you happiness, but you can get a huge yacht, pull up next to happiness and crawl all over it." And while I completely concur with this statement, one hundred percent; it would be pretty sad crawling all over happiness by yourself.

     I guess what I want to say is this; think about it. At what cost, this thing success? And success at what? Excelling at some endeavor that only serves to widen the gap between the haves and have nots? And in turn widens the gap between family members? It has been my limited experience that friends and family will stick around, even when all your 'stuff' has been taken from you. I mean, if you've been nice to them. I've known a couple of rich folks in my time and I don't know if I would classify any of them as 'happy'. I have also known a few poor folks that had some of the most wonderful existences and richest lives I've ever seen. It was mostly due to their particular experience, usually coming from some sort of adversity, and having a life perspective that shines a light on what is truly important.

     Nobody wants to be subservient to someone else, but try and show each other a little fucking respect from time to time. It goes a long way.

"Running"

     There is a curious fairy that resides at 1.5 mi out. She'll flit about, patiently waiting for me to come lumbering by. The road to meet her is grueling and fraught with danger. (mostly for my knee) But our visits are amazing and keep me coming back for more. They are also fleeting and over far too quickly; but I will remember her fondly, rise tomorrow and begin the chase once more.