Can You Recommend A Local Tattoo Artist To Me? Because I Am An Idiot Who Needs Ink.
A few months ago, on Facebook, I asked people for a recommendation of a good local tattoo artist. And then, because I am stupid and Facebook is impossible to search, I lost about ten good recommendations from people.
I’m going to be getting a tattoo of Rebecca – a silhouette of a photo taken of her, so I need someone who’s very good at doing photo-perfect work on flabby skin. My friend Kat will also be getting a tattoo to commemorate Rebecca’s life, but hers will be a design that she needs help with, so I need an artist who can also translate rough sketches into actual beauty.
This will be my only tattoo, I think. God willing. So make it good.
And it has to be a local tattoo artist – we have someone good in Pennsylvania, but we don’t want to drive three hours to what might be a multiple-session tattoo. So while I know there are many fine artists in your town, I’m not interested unless your town is near Cleveland.
(I’m also smart enough to know that tattoo artist > tattoo parlor, so specific names will be weighted better.)
Anyway. Thanks for everyone who did recommend last time, and I’m sorry I’m sufficiently dumb to forget to bookmark a Facebook post. If you can recommend here, I will at least be able to Google this post when I find it.
What Are You Most Happy To Have Left Behind From Your Life As A 20-Something?
My friend Geoff Hunt asked a great question: What are you most happy to have left behind from your life as a 20-something? And my answer was immediate:
That wandering feeling of uncertainty.
Which is to say that my teenaged years were about trying on masks really rapidly – one week I was seriously into prog rock, then I was a punk because I liked Billy Idol, and then I was soooo into reading 17 Magazine and pop for a while before I figured out that it was for girls. I had no idea who I was, so I kept experimenting – which was totally healthy, of course, because how are you going to know what you really like doing unless you try them all on?
And that’s why a lot of us don’t hang out with our teenaged buddies. It’s not that they’re not nice people. But there’s often these distinct and unpleasant reminders, usually in the form of embarrassing anecdotes, that they knew you before you were fully formed, and they keep highlighting these failed trial runs of Who You Might Be.
I thought I’d left that behind in my twenties, but the truth was that I’d left behind the wild experimentation but kept the idea that there was some role I had to play. I was a Rebel Punk. I was a Rowdy Drinker. I was a Guy Who Slept Around A Lot. I was a Bookseller. I was an Intellectual. I was a Jokester Who Told Funny Stories.
I spent a lot of time feeling like I was doing those roles pretty terribly. Mainly because I was an Intellectual but I hadn’t read all the right books – and more importantly, I didn’t want to, but I kept throwing myself at musty classics I didn’t enjoy because hey, that’s what Intellectuals did. I actually hated going out and getting drunk every night, but everyone else did it after work and it was what Rowdy Drinkers did, and so I did that. Plus, I had to Tell Funny Stories, so the drinking helped with that, even if sometimes I felt like I was exposing way too much of my life with these stories at inappropriate times, but that’s what my heroes did and so did I.
Oh, and I was a Rebel Punk! So I couldn’t enjoy a fine glass of Scotch and a nice meal, I had to be Rebellious and drink crappy beer at clubs that were sometimes fun dives but other times were just fucking uncomfortable pits I couldn’t wait to get out of.
And by the time I got to the end of my twenties, I was coming to realize that roles were like training wheels on a bike. They might be helpful when you’re starting out to give you an idea of how things go, but soon enough they start constraining your journey and they look totally dorky.
So I cast that off.
And I also cast this idea off, in my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoon of all time:
Because I had the idea that I had to be A Grown-Up, and A Grown-Up knew How To Do Things, and when my car got broken into then someone would hand me the Big Book Of Insurance Information and I would be magically gifted with all the knowledge. And I spent an inordinate amount of time chastising myself for not knowing how to buy a house, or not understanding how the stock market worked, or having no idea how my furnace worked in my apartment.
The truth was, I eventually realized, that yes, it’s all ad-libbed, and the best skill you can have as a grown-up is Investigation. I don’t know how much about to make a claim on insurance! But I know that there’s a number, and I can call someone there, and have them explain it to me, and then read whatever forms they send me. Today, there’s an Internet I can look at, which is also fantastically helpful.
Which is freeing. I still don’t know much about buying a house. That’s because Gini had bought seven houses in her lifetime, and I let her be good at what she does, and in the unlikely chance I ever have to buy a house solo, I can do research. I don’t have to know it all, and in fact the world is too damned big to carry all of this information I don’t need right now with me, so what if I don’t know how to start a fire in the woods or change my own oil? It’s not relevant. And if I want to learn it, great – certainly I’ve acquired all this silly info on beekeeping, despite the terrible job of it I’ve done this particular summer – but the point is that I’ve shifted away from the idea of Being A Grown-Up, and so I don’t have to memorize this arbitrary list of Things I Feel A Grown-Up Should Know.
And basically, my thirties and forties have become a journey in leaving roles aside and being me. I still sleep around a lot, but I do it because I enjoy it, not because I feel it’s some sort of identity I must project. I know a little more about the stock market, but my investments are mostly simple 401ks and a couple of IRAs, and I am comfortable knowing that my money isn’t completely optimized. And I’ve discovered I’m not an Intellectual at all, I don’t enjoy many of the great classics, and while I can occasionally be smart in public I’m in no way diminished if I haven’t read War and Peace or if someone knows more about the Scottish independence movement than I do.
Basically, in my twenties, I felt this constant, vague shame that I wasn’t living up to something. Now that I’m forty, I’m okay with being ignorant, and not fitting into anyone’s conception of me.
That’s a gift. It’s a wonderful freedom.
I can’t wait to find out what an idiot I’ll think forty-year-old me was, once I get to be sixty. I think that’ll be awesome.
If I Were A Celebrity With Millions Of Dollars….
I’d take a couple million from my last movie, and hire some very good hackers to set up an anonymous website. Then I would hire a couple of paparazzi and a private investigator.
This website would be called The Abyss Looks Back At You.com, and its entire purpose would be to:
1) Pick random users on Reddit who have posted links to, or otherwise supported, nude pictures stolen from celebrity cameras. Random. Could be anyone.
2) Have a hacker trace them back to their home address.
3) Get the private investigator to spend five days investigating them.
4) Send the paparazzi to stand outside their houses and take pictures of them. Only them. Not their family. That would be cruel.
Then periodically, I’d just post lengthy exposes of their lives, similar to what the Washington Post did with John Menese, the guy who started The Fappening. Not outright malicious stuff, of course, though if anything horrific turned up, well, we’d have to post that. Making excerpts of their Reddit-anonymized persona and linking it back to their real name, their job, their other hobbies. Posting pictures of them, coming out of their home, eating at restaurants, going to work. Just making it clear that anyone who decided that celebrities were exempt from the normal rules of privacy because they’re celebrities could be, to a very real extent, turned into a celebrity against their will.
Just a little chill, mind you. Just so that anyone passing that kind of thing would know there was a chance – a chance – that posting today’s naked pictures might have someone track back their burner account and show them what happens when someone turned that merciless eye back upon them.
I’d do that. But then again, I’m not a nice guy. And thankfully, I’m neither rich nor famous.
But I’d sure think about it.
Help Me Out By Asking Me Anything
My goddaughter Rebecca wore a rainbow princess dress that we got her for Christmas. She loved that thing. I saw her wear that dress more than anything else, wearing it to school, wearing it to play in, tearing around the house in this gaudy, frilly thing.
Last night, Gini and I put the dress in the corner with my dead Grampa’s chair, my dead stepfather’s lumberjack shirt, and my dead Uncle Tommy’s cane. Our little shrine to the fallen. And then we drank a couple of glasses of wine and read Cracked articles aloud to each other to laugh and finally, at two in the morning, I realized I needed an Ativan to sleep on top of that. Now I feel stomach-sick and logy.
I’m coming to realize that this grief is like arthritis, a lifelong condition with flareups. I’ll have good-Rebecca days and bad-Rebecca days, and… they’re all boring. It’s the same emotions over and over again, and I don’t want to talk about them because there’s nothing to be said.
So this is not a particularly good morning. But not quite bad enough to call in sick.
On most days, I keep myself amused through the day by reading comments as they come in (though I often wait until the end of the day to respond). To do that, I usually have to write an entry. And I was in the process of writing an interesting one about how you disclose your relationships to your other partners in poly, because that “How much should I tell them?” is one of the trickiest things about managing multiple partners, and… I just fell apart. I’ll probably do it tonight, God willing. It’s a solid topic.
But on the days I have nothing to offer, I ask you to give me amusement by asking me questions that you honestly want to know the answer to. Not bullshit questions like “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?” but anything else ranging from “So what’s your opinion on curling?” to “How do you manage a girlfriend and a wife?” to “What’s your favorite bit about writing?” to, well, whatever. I’ll answer honestly. And you’ll distract me a bit on a day when I could use some distraction. So it’s a mitzvah. If you can manage it.
The Nerdy Bars of Cleveland: A Review
Lakewood’s been having a weird trend lately: nerd bars. Or at least two nerd bars, one dedicated to board games and the other to classic arcade gaming, have opened up in the past two weeks. And since my good friend and TOTES NERDCORE RAP SUPERFAN Angie was visiting, we decided to head out and see how this whole nerdy thing worked.
Our first stop was the Barcade, which was a brilliant concept: why not put a bunch of arcade machines in a place where people serve drinks? Oh, wait, Dave and Buster’s did that, busted. Except Barcade has what one newspaper called the “reverse casino” model: all the games are free, but you pay for the drinks.
Okay, that’s not technically true. The selection of pinball machines (which include the Best Pinball Game of All Time, Attack from Mars) cost fifty cents, presumably because repairing pinball machines costs lots of money for spare parts. But you walk in, buy a drink, and get to play classic videogames all night.
This sounds great, and largely it is, but Barcade was so packed this early on that we literally had to elbow people aside to move. You know that rocking convention party where people are jammed in a room hip-to-hip and if you take a step back without warning you’ll knock someone over? Yeah, that crowded. So actually getting to the games was a problem. But the interior was pleasantly designed and clean, with lots of fun drinks – I had the Kevin Bacon, a bourbon-and-candied-bacon drink that was quite tasty, and Angie had the Punky Brewster, which was like cotton candy in a glass.
We would have more and larger drinks, but a) the bar had sadly sold out of their oversized novelty glasses already, and b) it was such a struggle getting to the bar that ordering one drink was enough. (Though the bartenders were a selection of hipster eye candy of both sexes.)
The bar had a really superb selection of classic videogames from the 80s and 90s, and they held Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat tournaments during the week. We watched a guy pile up a million-point score on Robotron 2084. We played Frogger, where Angie schooled me. We played Gyruss, where I schooled Angie.
But the issue was the crowds, which made it hard to play – you had to push through narrow corridors packed with people to get to your machine, and then wait a while for your turn, though thankfully most people were good about the “you lose, you walk” and not abusing the infinite credits. The main exception was a group of superbly annoying Woo Girls who’d camped out by the fucking Ms. Pac-Man machine, which inexplicably allowed continues, so they squealed and stayed for literally an hour as they were all like, “We’re up to 500,000 points now! Look how many screens we’ve gotten!” And everyone else went, “Yes, you fucking morons, you can get to 500,000 if you put infinite quarters in a badly-configured machine.” Why the hell would any free arcade allow continues on a Ms. Pac-Man?
Yet there was something happily convivial about getting snookered and playing the games of our youth. People were happily giving advice, if you needed it, and it would be pretty easy to strike up a conversation if you both found yourself waiting in line for the Street Fighter machine. So the crowds were both a plus and a minus, and I think when the blush is off the rose and there’s enough space to at least walk down the aisles without having to hip-check people out of the way, this will be truly awesome.
I do worry about the hammering, though, as three games were out of commission by the time we got there at 9:30 on a Saturday, and the Centipede machine’s fire button was well on its way to breaking. A bunch of drunks playing arcade machines are an unforgiving bunch, and I hope they have a repairman on call full-time, or soon this place will be a bunch of snapped joysticks.
(One other fascinating bit: there were several really attractive women in total club garb, standing about and looking confused. I think they were just hitting all the clubs in Lakewood and this was an obligatory stop – and while there were no shortage of women piling onto the NBA Jam and Simpsons machines, the club girls kept craning their necks about as if trying to see the appeal of this place.)
Then Angie and I walked down to the Side Quest Bar, which was about twenty minutes away on foot. The Side Quest Bar is devoted to board games – they have a selection that you can pay $1 to rent, and you’re encouraged to bring your own. They were in a soft open, with no food and limited beer selection (though honestly, their limited selection was pretty comprehensive).
Alas, the Side Quest bar was pretty much a solid dive bar with themed drinks, Dr. Who on the overhead screens, and a lot of games. The games were good, but part of the bar is the social aspect, and there weren’t really enough tables to play games on – only two or three big tables that I saw, whereas most of the space was taken up by the bar itself. So when we got there at around 11:00, I wouldn’t have found a place to join in. And I think this bar will succeed on whether it can get strangers to mix, i.e., finding multiple gamers willing to go to a bar to find a pickup game of Dominion or Cards Against Humanity, and I didn’t necessarily see that mixing – mostly groups keeping to themselves. (Though who knows, maybe those groups got there early as mixed people and had formed solid friendships by the time I’d arrived.)
But the atmosphere doesn’t really say “nerd,” unlike Barcade’s cool black themed bar and uniformed servers – it says “bar” with stuff thrown in. But the drinks were nice – I had a butterbeer that was surprisingly cinnamony (which is a nice change of pace from all the butterscotch-o-rama butterbeers I’ve had, if not necessarily superior), and Angie had a Sonic Screwdriver that I would have had more of were it not brimming with Red Bull.
I’ll probably go back to Barcade, as I’ll always play videogames. The Side Quest I may check out later on, to see how it’s evolved after the initial rush of curiosity is over – I suspect that will stand or fall on how creative the owners are at making events that get people in there to play games together. I’d play a Magic tournament there, if there were enough tables, and that spot would be perfect for a good round of pub trivia. So let’s hope.