{queue-up.and the holy ghost – black grape}
I want a tattoo. I also do not like pain. I’m on the unsteady horns of a dilemma. I made a compromise a number of years ago, as a coward and thinking man, and ordered temporary tattoos of the dragon tattoo I had in mind for my left forearm.
There is no time to slay the dragon. The dragon is your friend. – Reshad Feild, Paths to Freedom
In my case, today, the dragon tattoo is wearing off. With another shower, I will be tatt-free again. For me, the dragon represents two sides of a sharp sword I’ve been learning about since my earliest recollections. I’ve always been the one talking to loudly. I’m that kid at a sleepover that the parents have to keep redirecting. Go play with other kids; adult talk is boring. “I like adult talk,” says. Still do.
I’m somewhat of a kid inside. Not a simpleton, mind you, but still well connected with my childlike wonder at the world. I believe god is a force in the universe, not a person or a religion. I don’t comprehend Jesus, but I like a lot of what he said. Or allegedly said.
I do comprehend the spiritual connection we all share. Life. Even the animals. Most noticeable in cats and dolphins.
(non sequitur: Have you ever read Uplift by David Brin? It’s where the dolphins become sentient, through some human coaching. Then, they are discovered to be fantastic spaceship navigators.)
In my fantasy tattoo, the one fading off my left arm now, is two rough abstract dragon drawings. A black dragon shape is covering most of a red dragon shape beneath. This is my metaphor for creative drive. The left arm, in my cosmology, is the hand, arm, side of receiving. The right arm, my right, is my drive, my energy, my dominant hand.
So the black dragon represents my creative drive. I listen. I nurture. I push, torture, and rile up my dragon all the time. Creativity is my addiction. The red dragon then represents the flaming hot passion of the creative drive that overwhelms my regular life. In the past, I might go days without sleeping. I might ingest plant magic or pharma magic or unknown magic, trying to unlock a new escape key.
As an artist, I am looking for escape. I am looking to find time and a safe, warm space to write and create. Today, I have that. I have not bridged the income gap, however, to live how I want to live without further employment of the average kind. I just came off an 8-month survival job, Whole Foods Market, and the silver lining is I’m going to be able to COBRA my health insurance off Jeff Bezos for 18 months. Okay, my next inflection point has been established.
Also today, a job I’ve been waiting to hear about moved me into the next and hopefully final round of interviews. Not a perfect job. Good money. Hybrid, so only in the office three days a week. I interview in two days, thus I am getting my haircut in a few hours. I’m going to remove some of the David Lynch and add a bit more Anderson Cooper. Yes, my hair is almost entirely white, a legacy gift from my father’s side. I look young, but my hair must be tamed for the corporate world. Fine. I do not have an unusual attachment to my hair, one way or another. I do get compliments about it when it’s up. At the moment, it’s way too far up. Too many compliments and I wonder if I’m not more comic than cool.
Fine. Clean-shaven. Clean corporate haircut. I have a coaching call with the recruiting team tomorrow. Get me prepped. They make zero dollars if I don’t get the job.
The creative process, creative drive, that often [in me] becomes a creative obsession. I can get a project going and begin to lose touch with reality. In my earlier days, that meant not going to school, staying home sick from work, or going without sleep for long periods of time as a stimulant and reality distortion drug. I could light my brain on fire by reading and writing all night. If the topic was really great, or my rock opera is going well, I might start thinking… I don’t need this job. I don’t need this hassle.
What I need is to be seen, recognised, and allowed to work full-time on my creative writing, my AI creativity coaching, my stuff, my creative stuff. This is known as entitlement. Somehow, my white upper-class college boy believes he deserves a job. That’s bullshit, now I understand. I am back in that place at the moment. I still need the job.
The black dragon is the creative impulse. The red dragon is the overwhelming rush of a hot creative idea as it sets my mind and body on fire. Without careful management, the red dragon will kill the black dragon. As I said, it’s a metaphor. Even as the temp tattoo is fading, I am beholden to the dragon for creative inspiration. I am a highly active human. I am responsible for my own balance, my own money, and the taming and harnessing of my own creative dragon.
I am not that interested in getting a tattoo of these dragons or anything really, I don’t particularly like tattoos. I think about it. Maybe with the right partner…
{queue-up.red dragon tattoo.fountains of wayne}
I think about my dragon a lot. Today, I’m in between jobs again. And the new gig is on the horizon. As I’ve been learning to discipline myself into action, I have been pressing on the job application front, curtailing any music or band-related activities. Creating music, playing live, and singing are some of my heart passions. I don’t make money from my music. Yet.
(non sequitur, I forgot what I was going to put there. Let’s give it a minute; my thoughts will catch up to my fingers. Did I mention I’m a very good typist?
As I dig back into my human-LLM of memories of my father, I remember he had a parlor trick he apparently performed at many of the extravagant parties they had at the lake house. We had a baby grand piano (I hated taking lessons, and they hated me) in the living room. My sister has it in her living room. She’s not a musician. She does like to collect valuable things and family heirlooms.
Many years ago, when all of her children were still alive, my mom divided up her valuables on paper so we could all have awareness and choice. She died 40 years later, so she did well. In that list, I recall the funniest item I asked for: the Sony Trinitron in the downstairs study. (Srsly, McElhenney, you asked for the TV? Massive irony moment.) In that same document, my mom assigned the baby grand piano to come to me. I was her musician.
Many years later, my sister has twins, boy and a girl. The boy plays piano and sings in his private Catholic school’s traveling choir. A Renaissance man, as I consider myself. I even wrote a book about creativity as 12 letters to him. Read. I’m not sure he read them or the dedication, but that’s not important.
In a historical and hysterical moment, my mom bequeathed the baby grand to my sister’s kid. I asked about it a few times. Neither my mom nor my sister, after my mom died, wanted to give me an explanation. To be fair, over the last fifteen years, since my divorce, it’s only in the last 4 that I’ve had a house that could hold the baby grand piano.
I’m going to ask my sister if she recalls the song my dad learned to play. He would smash the piano on this one song and never learn to play another song or instrument. He wanted to be an actor. He was certainly handsome and fit enough.
So, that piano still gathers dust at my sister’s house. Unplayed. The twins are out and about. It’s my dad’s piano, though. I don’t really need it. I have been thinking about buying a piano, though. When I solve the cash flow thing again.
My son inherited the second piano my mom purchased. An upright that she kept at her house for Read. See, my mom adored Read’s musical talents. She did not like mine.
She was hurt by mine. Hurt by my early musical dragon-led bullshit. Hurt and redirected in her life, in the same powerful way my life has been curved in new ways by my son’s acting out. I apologized to her a million times for killing her NYC dreams.
And that one time, during Christmas, the first December from Exeter. I went to New York City to be with my mom and my sister, who lived there. My mom got an apartment on off 63rd somewhere, near the park, East or West, I don’t remember. She had rented an apartment, a very small loft in a newly remodeled brownstone.
She, too, was going to make it in New York like her daughter, Sidney, had. It wasn’t a competition; it was my mom following my sister’s creative and explosive dragon training from her Bowery loft. Her boyfriend, and future fiancée of the time, still owns a full floor of one of these buildings down further in the East Village. Must be nice. He lives in Germany now, with his wife of twenty years or so. No kids, just art.
In my meteoric ascent and crash into the sun at my first attempt to achieve escape velocity sufficient to pull me out of my alcoholic dad’s orbit. I got kicked out two weeks before the end of my freshman year. Booted.
The part I am just getting a chance to relive is with my son’s erratic behavior and trouble with launching. My mom worked with me that summer to brush up on Spanish (great pressure had mounted on me when I failed the first semester), and she got me enrolled in a new, much smaller prep school in Maine.
Escape Again
I am not going to run along too far into the future about what happened in Maine. That’s an entirely different book, series, probably. I’ve been writing on this one since my first novel, The Dream Academy, was rejected by all the publishers I submitted to. I’ve still got the spiral-bound copy. I don’t think I can open the WORD files of that book on my current Mac.
I escaped Austin again, to Maine. And things were immediately different from my Exeter experience. In this little prep school, I was a big fish. I started on Varsity Football, runner-up at State that year, placed in the 100-meter freestyle, and made it to the state championships, false-starting in the first heat. I also came completely unstuck in time and space due to a fantasy I had about saving my father from the booze.
I had escaped the hellscape of my dad’s influence once again. I recall in college, I would park at my dad’s medical office and walk to school. I would go in and say hi. Mostly to his nursing staff. My dad was very busy. But this didn’t last long, as my dad had yet another heart attack during my freshman year at The University of Texas, Austin. The repair of that defective heart unleashed the cancer cells still hiding in his body from a melanoma he had removed from his back 20 years earlier. I guess that’s a pretty good result. A golfball-sized cancer growth was removed, adding 20 or more years to his life. This time, it was angry.
The cancer reemerged in my father’s brain, and within a week of release from the hospital for the heart blockage, he was diagnosed with brain cancer.
Fade to black.
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