It had never occurred to me that I would want my tattoo artist to be a sadist.

On this most recent Friday, I sat for my latest piece of body art, a bit of tribute to Lilith and my own inner badass. It’s a chest piece that peeks out from my shirt, and is perhaps the most painful tattoo I’ve ever started.

I say started, because after three hours, the piece was outlined, but unfinished, and I had to call it. My next session for this piece won’t be until May, since I’m traveling a month from now for a ¾ sleeve to memorialize this current time of psychic restructuring.

I yelped. I squealed. I had to assure my artist that it was fine. I gripped my body so hard to try to still myself that every bit of me aches, creaky and stiff, barely yielding to my meditation and yoga today. My artist apologized, said she didn’t want to hurt me. Probably the first time I’ve encountered that, which makes me conclude I’ve been tattooed by at least a few sadists.

My occasional jumps and writhes are understandably a problem for a tattoo artist, but her distress over my pain, an experience I clearly understood as part of the cost of what I paid a premium for, made the pain worse.

Or maybe, it was just the fact that it was, as she called it, the motorboat from Hell.

“This body, this body holding me
Be my reminder here that I am not alone in
This body, this body holding me
Feeling eternal, all this pain is an illusion”

“Parabola”, from Tool - Lateralus

It’s been a long week. A long weekend. I’m burned out. I had to cancel plans with a friend this week because I was so burned out, I knew I couldn’t go through with my commitments on the weekend with the limited battery I had left. I’ve given a lot to others. To community. To friends. And it’s not without its rewards but I’m in a place where there is no amount of me doing anything alone that will resolve it.

This is not to say my evening meditation and yoga at my local studio wasn’t necessary to cap my weekend. It definitely was! The theme was the divine feminine, and not to go to far into the weeds, one thing I walked away with was the forgotten, silent ancestors and kin of mine who I never got to know, who I share DNA. The cool resilience and survival. To let myself be buttressed and held.

After coming home, eating takeout Thai (I’m currently obsessed with the fried tofu Pad Thai from Pink Bee), I started getting ready for bed, and as he often does, my eldest picked up his bass and started playing. He usually plays the same few pieces, recognizable and familiar, but tonight he started playing “Schism” by Tool - which surprised me, because I didn’t know he was working on any Tool songs, and Tool was perhaps too “soft and commercial” for his tastes. Not his words, but certainly his vibe when he will critique bands that are in the metal genre, but that I love.

I talked to him about it, and he had forgotten how much I loved Tool. I mean, I guess I’m in a louder, heart-hurting, angrier mood today. Kevin Cole’s show on KEXP this afternoon had a great set that included Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, Dark Chisme - and I came home and listened to a bit of Kraftwerk, then Violator and after “Personal Jesus” moved on to “Heresy” by Nine Inch Nails, and how can you not top that with “Dear God” by XTC?

This is rambling tonight. I’m not sorry. I’m on my third listen through of my three favorite songs off of Tool’s Lateralus - “Schism”, “Parabol” and “Parabola” - you have to listen to them together. I may argue that truly, you just need to listen to the whole album beginning to end, but you don’t always have time for that.

I loved this album so much when it came out. I wasn’t a big Tool fan at the time, but at the time I was deeply steeped in the psychedelic culture. Alex Grey, and his art, was thoroughly enmeshed in the online community I was in. The album art alone was reason to purchase the CD. I fell in love with this album very, very hard; I listened to it obsessively.

My eldest playing “Schism” opened my up my heart a crack. He patiently listened to me talk about how much it means to me to listen to Lateralus, to this day. He did, however, protest that Tool is just a less cool, less technically accomplished sound than Voivod.

Next Sunday afternoon, March 22nd, is the tree planting with Jon’s soil. Please reach out to me if you’d like to join us. It will be on the Olympic Peninsula at a cidery, and there are food and NA options (which I will be taking advantage of, because I don’t drink alcohol now!) This cidery has been good to us, and I’m happy that this will stay a place in our hearts.

The thing about physical pain is that while it’s going on, you really can’t think about anything else. All you can do is try to breathe and be in it. Tattooing is sacred in many cultures and like so many things it has been appropriated, bastardized, and secularized, with folks like me turning it into my own agnostic, anarchic, ritual.

Plucking the strings of the ether hoping some resonance carries through.