I think I need this me now. As much as I ever have. The sacred oneness of creation and self-reflection. I hope to make words work again in my favor. So: be there now please, magic.
I’m doing my best to get right with the way things actually work. I found a job outside of Detroit of all places. There are a few blooming suburbs here where money grows fatly from happy vines, even in the bleakest of winters. I came here with a strange attitude for me. The lesson that I came here with is that if I could just get my hands on a few thousand dollars I could finally buy for myself that crucial place where I can afford to be myself and to make art without having to answer to anybody. To do so I have to rely on the skills that I have.
One of the skills that I have is that I am a rabid ninja busboy. Give me the most cramped and small floor and I will dance around it with my arms full of plates or coffee and water. I work well in chaotic environments. I have a strong sense of order which applies itself well on these floors. I think that part of me really flourished during my deployment when my brain was most taxed with how to make it all work… and the sense that people depended on me coordinating these things efficiently. The urgency and the calm that must be maintained. This dance quiets my mind. It also makes a lot of money. Well, a lot of money for a guy who has grossed about five thousand dollars over the last five years. And how nimble I was with those five thousand dollars. All the stories those dollars bought me.
Learning to live cheaply is the best thing you can do for yourself.
So I came into this town with a few hundred dollars and by the second day I had a job at the hippest little lunch spot in town where the floor is almost always turning and burning. I should emphasize that we are very little. There are nine tables and eight seats at the bar and they are often all full. There is usually a line at the door during our lunch hours. People wait because the food is awesome. My job is to do the people at the door the justice of cleaning the tables as quickly as I can while maintaining all the shake and rollup duties as well and a million other things that come along. I work from six-eight hours a day five days a week.
It is incredibly demanding work both physically and mentally, but if you can figure out a rhythm between the physical and the mental there is an awful lot of money to be made. So I work my hardest and I like to think that I do a good job. I’m a little short if not sometimes downright unsociable.
I learned how to bus amongst the hispanic community in the hip joints of Chicago where we were paid to be unseen. We weren’t allowed to talk to the customers because some of us couldn’t speak English and we rarely talked to each other because talking was a form of wasting time in the sleak machine that is Wicker Park. We are calm faced and graceful and dressed in all black. The best of us are never seen and you never even said thank you. We didn’t mind.
But here I’m not a Mexican. I’m your status quot hipster with a background in art. And I’m saving every dollar to buy my freedom back so that I can return to my one true love without having to report for someone else s duties. It might take years. I’m ok with that. I have to be. I have all the faith in the world that I can manage it.
I don’t know quite what this freedom is going to look like yet or where it will be. All I know is that it will have me with my machines in my hand and skin to work on. If I can make 50 dollars a day I can live well. I’m proving that to myself every day right now.
I’m sure there is a large market for people who would want a days worth of tattooing done for 50 dollars. I’m worth that.
I can make good lines and I can shade and I can change you forever and better yet I can guarantee you’re not going to regret it. I’m an artist. I take that very seriously. I have it tattooed on my neck. A paper bird and three paper flowers above “Lifer” so that I never forget who I am and why I came here to this place of creation to begin with.
I paid good money to have it finished. It looks beautiful now… like I knew it could be. Obviously I’m not saving every dollar. But the majority of them. Getting tattoos is part of my business now, too. It could potentially land me an apprenticeship at the local shop. Passing through their doors would guarantee a quality of work that could get me in in any city. Who knows. Maybe this could be a reality by the time I’m 30. Probably later.
But not having art in my life this last month as I’ve been adapting to the new job has been kind of depressing. I find that when we are just workers in some machine our lives are so simple they hardly merit any advanced thought. You are, after all, just performing a set of duties that you agreed to for some amount of pay. Some days I worry that I will inevitably be eaten by the machine, to become just some pacing drone like I’ve been running from for so long. To happily go back to that for a more comfortable, sedentary life. And I am happy now aside from being brutally ill for the whole last week. Every day there is the question:
What happens next?
The Paper Trail 