live on time, emit no evil

So, it's been a while since I posted, but it's my day off and if I can't find some time to write on my day off, then I'm further gone than I thought.

I took this personality test on a whim recently. The test is somehow linked with judaism or something. It's the atzmi test or something. Since I'm in tattoo mode, I've been thinking about my last tattoo (as in final, not preceeding), which is the tree-of-life, from Kabalah. Anyway, I've been more open to that kind of knowledge lately and when the test appeared in my gmail margins, I clicked on it. The results of the test were amazingly spot-on. Some of it was hard to deal with, or accept. Fortunately, alot of it wasn't so hard to accept because alot of my scores were good.

One of the bad things it said was that I have a limited vocabulary, both internally and in practice. At first I was like, "no way," but then I thought about it. I do have a tendency to think abstractly and in images rather than in words. And I also tend to not speak at all rather than practice erudition. I think I would've scored higher at this a few years ago, but I think I've gone out of the practice of writing. And unfortunately, everything that comes with that practice has gone away as well.

And so, here I am, practicing. Hoping it will somehow be the spark of a habit.

Back to what I mean by "tattoo mode."

Recent posts were about the LA Ink submission. Since I've gotten no response from them, I've decided to explore other tattoos. I still intend on having Hannah do the mobius strip tattoo, because her name is a palindrome and because I like her and I totally think her work is awesome.

I went in to make an appointment with Miles, who also works at Deluxe Tattoo (where Hannah worked before moving to LA). He recently did my friend Ryan's tattoo, which is a full-sleeve dragon and it's amazing. Miles and I also have a connection because the drummer from my old band and him grew up together so I'd already met him.


This tattoo is a modified woodblock print from the famous Hiroshige, who did what is supposedly the most well-recognized woodblock image in the world, the View of Mount Fiji or something, often referred to as The Wave.


The modifications were minor. It's sort of an homage to my mother, so I changed the color of the titmouse from a grey-green to blue. My Mom loves bluebirds. I also reversed the orientation so that it follows the contours of my torso better. After flipping the horizontal, I needed to flip the text back to forwards again, as well. Finally I changed the cascade of the poetry a bit. I hope Hiroshige's not mad at me.

Turns out Miles is booked until February 1st. Naturally I made the appointment, but I want something a little sooner than that, so I made an appointment with Max, from Revolution Studio, to do a small tattoo on my left elbow.


It's Japanese kanji, "kotobuki," or, "long life and celebration." I have a tapestry hanging in my dining room of this character, and I've had it for a long time. I've had this design ready for a few years. It's just time for me to start finishing what I've started with my own tattoos. I'm looking forward to the finished product.

Anyway, regarding the title of this blog, I've started the design for the piece I want Hannah to do. The design was so difficult for me to envision that I decided to make a model of it using ribbon, so I could see exactly how the image will need to twist and turn and how the letters would look while twisted into different orientations.


Creating the model turned out to be quite useful and inspiring as the pencil sketch of the tattoo is already finished. I wanna do a consult with an artist before I ink it and color it, though. I want to make sure that the dimensions are just right. I'm actually quite impressed with what I've come up with so far, the design is pretty complicated. More on that another time.