To The End!

I am breaking my record-breaking silence to bring you some news.

First of all, a short essay appears in an online publication called Killing the Buddha. It is here. There will also be a reading on Tuesday August 5 at Pacific Standard at 7 p.m, where on Tuesdays they have “various $3 drink specials.”

It’s been quiet for some time on SuperLefty, but not because I have nothing to say. I have been working on longer things intended for print publication. Things utilizing thousands of words instead of mere hundreds, or a mere lone thousand! Tens of thousands of words, not to say hundreds of thousands of words, each carefully chosen by me personally for your reading pleasure.

So be patient, and do not lose faith, and do not abandon this non-place in non-space completely, for I will not completely abandon it, or you. But it is time for new things, bigger things, dare I say better things to come to fruition.

During my record-breaking silence this web site turned five. It is five years old, as is my day job in its current incarnation, which I like to call, Freelance Or Die!. For many years I have considered getting a Freelance Or Die! tattoo, but instead I got one that’s a little bit more open to interpretation.

Me my little bro went and got tattooed together for his 25th birthday. Right on our inner forearms, you know, where they take the blood from. Because we are blood! To the end! It’s pretty much our sibling motto, but I’ve found it can mean a lot of different things, depending on how you look at it on any given day. I’ve also found I cannot control how it (or anything) is perceived or interpreted by other people. One of my students, a rather adorably morose indie rock emo type, took one look and said, “Is that like, ‘Shoot heroin, right here, to the end?'”

This picture above shows it nice and fresh. It’s since healed up and flattened out a bit, but I like it raw, the better to see how my very own handwriting was inked into my very own flesh with a sharp needle.

“It’s my first tattoo,” I told the fully sleeved tattoo artist.

“Then you’ll always remember me,” he said, wiping and shaving my arm with authority. So far, he was right. His name is “Jon” with no “h.”

I had been curious and anxious to get a tattoo. I can report to my untattooed readers that while it was technically painful it was really no big deal, though this tattoo took about as long to ink as it would to write with a pen, so my pain threshold was not tested to Rambo-esque levels. It was tested somewhere beyond mosquito-bite levels, though not the enormous mosquito that bit me in Vermont and left a dime-sized bloodstain on the collar of my thermal, which was kind of cool, as if I’d been hickeyed by a vampire.

Now it is summer and I have packed the calendar and emptied my bank account planning travels near and far. And so I am chock full of checklists, never unpacking my bags. What good is money if it does not turn into experience? If it does not become experience I will turn it into dresses and crab cakes. And it is experience, not dresses or crab cakes, that turns into the stories, because as I’ve always said, You can’t make this shit up. Or at least I can’t.

So sit tight, and keep summering and keep stopping by. I may go quiet but I will never go away. Your SuperLefty is always with you, dear readers!

To the end!