Red Region Inferno

I actually woke up early today.
Thought  ’cool, coffee and a breakfast bagel this morning’
Jumped in my car and headed down the main road…
Out of an alley – turning left – going fast – into my lane (the wrong way) Bam!

Not cool.
I had a Big Lebowski moment.
My first thought was “Bummer man.”

Turned out the guy was a client of mine.
He had worked a double shift and hadn’t slept.
He looked like he was going to cry.

The cop didn’t take to long with his report.

The stupid insurance people still haven’t called me though…
and I am car-less.

My poor car got a fat lip

Decided it was a good time to start biking again.
I have been planning on it anyway.
Maybe this was fate.

The huge bummer part is that my car has been paid off forever and I just got new brakes, tires, and an alternator.
$1400 bucks for that and the insurance people wont give one bit of a care about that.
They will give me the least they can I am sure and I will not be able to replace the car with what the pay.
So… I see car payments in my future.
Mega Bummer!

I often get asked by people I run into outside of my work what it is I do.

I like to say I doodle.

This of course causes some confusion.

How can that be? You doodle for a living?

That is not a doodle!

According to wikipedia
A doodle is a type of sketch, an unfocused drawing made while a person’s attention is otherwise occupied. Doodles are simple drawings that can have concrete representational meaning or may just be abstract shapes.

Stereotypical examples of doodling are found in school notebooks, often in the margins, drawn by students daydreaming or losing interest during class. Other common examples of doodling are produced during long telephone conversations if a pen and paper are available.

Popular kinds of doodles include cartoon versions of teachers or companions in a school, famous TV or comic characters, invented fictional beings, landscapes, geometric shapes, textures, banners with legends, and animations made by drawing a scene sequence in various pages of a book or notebook.

What is it, if not love? It is love in it's most true form. The storms and seasons of our most heart-felt relationships. The calm in the midsts of fire and the thorns on the vines of our most beautiful emotions. It is what happens when a pencil flows free in the hand while the mind wanders and contemplates such things.

Almost every single painting I do starts like this.

It is just me spacing out and drawing something with a pencil (like in the example above) or with a pen and then way later on if the image has captured my mind I may paint a new version.

Or…. I may not.
Sometimes I just like the drawings and never wish to paint them.
They are just fine as is.

Other times when I start a painting it is directly on canvas with paint…
same process, just skip the sketch portion.
The painting is a sketch.
I just put on some tunes and start painting. It will become what it becomes.

So… there ya have it.
I doodle for a living.

The end of the night is coming up and I am finishing my last little bit on a pretty cool tattoo of the Seattle Space needle when in walks my son.

I ask him what is up and he tells me a couple guys are coming in for navel piercings.

Back in the late 80′s and early 90′s navel piercing was a unisex thing. As many guys as gals got them… but it has changed over the years and now we do maybe one male navel a month. It is mostly girls who pierce the navel.

My son is texting back and forth with the guys and tells me they are on the way down.

Ahhh… spur of the moment piercings.

Getting ready for the navel piercing

Needle in place - it is time to pierce

Fitting the navel jewelry

Piercing is done, ring is in place. Note the lower corner of this guys beer monster tattoo... it covers a scar below his liver. The monster is coming out of the can to get his liver. Yep, he is loving on his liver at a very young age. Lotsa beer and hard A to fuel this body.

Another happy client ready to party up the weekend with a new navel piercing to show off to his drinking buddies.

If you are wondering why I have pictures of just one of the guys it was because I thought this guys pictures showed more humor with the “Beer Monster” tattoo and his T-shirt.
Totally cracks me up.

The body piercer shown is my son O’Rion. He has been piercing professionally since 2005.

The beer moster tattoo was drawn by the client himself and applied by me a couple years ago.

The reason for this post… Simply a matter of my thinking the whole situation to be funny and the pictures kinda captured the humor.

Will the client eventually put one of those dangle charm jewelry pieces in his navel? I am doubting it. More than likely he will stretch it out to about a 2 gauge hole and keep a simple ring in it.

I’m a gigolo.
Giga-who? 
Women pay me to give them… pleasure. 
How did you get that job? 
I just sort of fell into it.
I’m gonna kill my guidance counselor!
Ever watch Deuce Bigalow- Male Gigolo?

My favorite line is when  Antoine Laconte taps on the glass and says “Hey.. Fishy, fishy, fishy.” in baby talk and Deuce replies “They don’t like that.”

Well…. that is pretty much the line I had going through my head the entire time I was tattooing this fish.
Yes I realise that it is not the exact species‘Chinese Tailbar Lionfish’ that was in the movie but that is splitting hairs.
It is pretty much the same critter.

Guess you could call this a fish portrait. I did the tattoo from a photo of the clients actual fish. It was done in one setting and it came out perfectly. (as in looked just like his fish)

For you Deuce Bigalow fans…. Some lovely date banter…

Kate: I don’t understand why women do it. I don’t see how they can get any pleasure from it. It’s not supposed to go up there. Frankly, I don’t even understand how men do it, either.
Deuce: You wouldn’t want to try it, just to try something new?
Kate: No, it’s just…not natural.
Deuce: So you’re definitely opposed to space travel?
Kate: Totally! I mean, more power to any woman who wants to be an astronaut, but I’m just not into it. Frankly, I’d rather take it up the butt.

When you think back on your childhood and the things that you found fun…. do you ever wonder how the hell you found some of those things fun?
Do you ever wish that you still did?

Life would be awesome if I could be entertained by playing marbles.
Oh how I wish I could get lost in the imaginary world of G.I. Joe vs the aliens for hours on end.
Slip and slide?
Tetherball for 3 hours in a row?
Playing in a sand box with dinosaurs until past dark and my parents yelling at me to come inside… Heck yes, those were the days!

Most of the things that entertained me when I was a kid are fucking stupid and boring.
It’s almost hard to imagine how simple I was.

Some things last forever however and for me one of those things is Skee ball.
I usued to love playing skee ball when I went to the Clallam county fair.
I used to love playing skee ball when I went to amusement parks as a child.
Once became an adult I have found that I always had to play a game or two any time I ran into it.
I have played skee ball in at least 20 different states.
Boardwalks, state fairs, arcades…. anyplace I ran across skee ball I played.
Even a few of the finer drinking establishments out there have seen the light and placed skee ball off by the pool tables for drunks and sober drivers alike.

I suppose that others share my love of skee ball.
Heck , they made that the game that God was playing in the movie Dogma. Obviously somebody was thinking SKee Ball when that movie was being played.

This is my lovely wife who likes to act like a goofball pretty much any time I point a camera at her. Here we have her goofing with some skee balls. She loves playing with balls and I never have to ask twice. She is always up for a good game of Skee Ball (God bless her little heart) and she never pays attention to the score.

The above picture was taken at Seattle Center.
I can safely say that Seattle Center may have the worst skee ball in Washington state.
If you are in the Seattle area and looking for some skee ball action I would suggest checking out Gameworks.
Please note that Skee Ball is best played while buzzed and Gameworks does serve beer.