Week IV: Ink

My real introduction to body modification happened when I was about thirteen years old. I was exploring paths to spirituality and self-knowledge outside the constraints of my religious upbringing, which forbade tattoos and piercings. I encountered the works of Fakir Musafar by way of BMEzine.com, which is the world's largest collection of images, stories, and history of body modification of every type, from the most mundane to the most extreme imaginable.

I read a lot about Fakir - his own writings and those of many who worked with him. I discovered the cultural heritage of body modification. I learned about the history of painful rituals as rites of passage. As I dove deeper into my reading, I became enraptured by the idea of decorating my body for the sake of the experience in addition to the end result.

Let's get this out of the way: I think that tattoos look really cool. I get them because I like to have art on my body. Are they a source of vanity? Sure. I'm happy to offer that explanation to most anyone who asks. I enjoy the aesthetic aspect of tattoos. I like to show them to people and chat with other folks about their body art. There's undoubtedly an element of exhibitionism in my decision to get large, visible tattoos.

I don't spend a lot of time telling people about my more personal reasons for getting tattoos, hence this week's blog entry. It's a lot more than skin deep. Culturally, we have little to nothing in the way of ritualistic coming of age ceremonies. We're taught to avoid pain. We're provided with a myriad of numbing agents to block pain when it inevitably comes. We're taught to abhor and defer pain as much as possible. I was never encouraged to hurt my body for the sake of art or self-discovery, but it has been the most essential tool in my life for building my personal philosophy. The experience of being tattooed takes me to a plane of thought and consciousness that I haven't achieved by any other means.

I believe that spiritual progress (define spiritual as you see fit) is impossible without pain. Being subjected to pain is an opportunity to explore and expand my body, my mind, my capacity for sensation. It happens that my favourite way to experience pain is through tattoos. Every session is an opportunity for me to meditate, to be completely connected to my body. I learn to manage hours of constant pain through deep relaxation. It gives me a chance to build empathy for people who are hurting. It provides a channel for psychological hurts to be healed by physical means.

I got my first tattoo the summer after I turned 18. I booked a session with Michelle at Ritualistics in Edmonton, where I would subsequently spend a lot of time. I had a star with a spiral in the background inked on my stomach and ribs. The idea that inspired it was "peace in the midst of chaos." The artist left town before our second session, and the tattoo remains unfinished. It's significant now for a different reason than when I first had it done - my closest friend in high school, Lisa Cirka, was with me when I got it. She died a few years ago, and I think about her every time I look at my tattoo. She held my hands and we grooved to the hip-hop on Michelle's stereo. I squeezed harder for the particularly painful spots and did my best to relax, breathe deeply, and sink into the waves of endorphins that rushed through my body in a way I'd never experienced before.

My second tattoo was also done at Ritualistics. I got it because I need at least one tattoo in my life that's completely silly and frivolous. If I ever decide that I don't like it, no worries, because I never have to look at it and it'll fade away in a few years. My friends Johnny and Brian got tattoos inside their bottom lips, and I wanted to be one of the cool kids, so I got "bite me" tattooed on mine. My mother reads my blog and will be finding out about this for the first time. Sorry, mom. But you've got to admit it's at least a bit funny.

My third tattoo, again at Ritualistics, was a rendering of this drawing by Brandon Boyd, the lead singer of Incubus. It's on my right thigh. The piece is called "there's never been a better time to be on fire." It wasn't executed particularly well but, as with every tattoo, the experience was overwhelmingly positive. I'll get it covered with something more professional eventually. For now I'm happy to have it as a reminder of the good times and the context that inspired it.

I had my fourth tattoo done with my partner. It was her first one. We had matching compass roses done the same day we got engaged. Mine was on my left calf. It's common knowledge in the tattoo world that getting a matching tattoo is a surefire way to guarantee the relationship won't be successful. It's the matching tattoo curse. It was hubris to think that mine would turn out otherwise.

My fifth tattoo was inked by Aza, also at Ritualistics. It was my big tattoo coming-out party - my first that's readily visible when I'm fully clothed. I found the original image in a textbook; it's on my left forearm and says "do not be distracted" in Sanskrit. A daily reminder to focus on what's important. Why Sanskrit? Because it looks badass, that's why.

My sixth tattoo will be the subject of a full 1,000 words after it's finished. It covers my fourth tattoo, and my left leg from the knee down. The experience has been among the most enlightening and enjoyable of my whole life. It's being done by Ian at Wolf/Sheep Arthouse in Victoria. It's been intense, and merits more than a paragraph in explanation. I'm elated with how it's turned out, and I've reached my word limit for the week.

I love tattoos. On me, on you. I'll be getting them until I run out of skin. Until then I'll be thinking about my next one. My body is a temple and I'm going to sanctify it inside and out with painful, beautiful art.

Word count: 1,056

Week III: Down the rabbit hole

Your wakefulness each morning is equal in consequence to your rest and to your unrest. You survive the hard frost and the cold world and borrow breath another day. It is dark. A digital tether to society eviscerates your dreams in a false moment when you were lost but unafraid. Beep beep beep. Precious hours of sleep turned too quickly. Hours spun until you reeled. Your balance failed you and you fell.

You clench your teeth and you cling to sleep like a raft. It is a ghost. It eludes you. The spectre of your unconsciousness fades receding with the shadows. The sun taunts you fingering the swollen bags under your eyes. It intrudes your gaze and mocks your resistance. It laughs and creeps overhead to illuminate the cold grey. Your vision clouds over with blurry resentment and you blink heavily and squint. Your eyelids are burdened and tired and rely heavily on stimulants. Dose after dose after dose keeps them up. It is artificial.

The second hand cuts you. Tick tick tick. A thousand cuts bleeding away your resolve. The clock is always winding down. Its precision cold and calculated and it is lifeless and counts your slipping numbers. You begrudge each second that passes and you need every one. They are a rare constant. The rhythmic tap tap tap reminds you. Your life is not over. You are still at fault. You are not out yet.

You study the mirror. A moment before the day swallows you to reflect. You wonder is it apathy or self defense that keeps you upright. Your senses are taxed from your first waking moment. A cigarette a coffee a desk a screen a box. You torment yourself. You suffer but why. You ask too much of your body and it offers you less in return.

Your skin is calloused. You are resisting and your surroundings are constantly irritating and grinding. Your cycle is finite but the violence is endless. Wear thicker armor. Its weight will be greater and its strain on your neck and shoulders will keep you from sleep. Your head and your chest and your back will ache. You can swallow distractions until you are numb and when you wake up tomorrow you will need more. Your body will suffer.

You grimace and stretch and hunch your back. Your thoughts pull muscles closer and tighter. A puppeteer with hands through the sinews in your neck holds them taut. You feel the ratcheting tension. You inhale deeply until the knives between your shoulders stop you short. You wish to exhale the stress with a more forceful breath. You will rigid fibres to ease and release and they tense and inflame in defiance.

Your eyes close and you can block everything but the ringing in your ears. You reach back to dreams. You permit yourself to walk away from the mirror. You submit to your routine and your surrender is ugly. The daily gears grind into motion overcoming static inertia. Your involuntary groan admits what words do not express.

Your mind and body are at odds at every moment. The imaginary is made flesh in constricted joints. You ache from solitary hours. The pain is frequent and unrelenting and you rarely notice it except when your shoulders fall and the air coats your lungs and pushes your organs aside and you are relieved for a second. The pace slows. Gather yourself. You are obligated to proceed.

Your simple repast makes you full but not whole. It is poison. You chose it. Upgraded. Refined. Your molars fracture bonds and crystals and the whole mess. You consume. Your body struggles. The tasks you demand of your guts are cruel. Another cigarette another coffee another distraction.

You distract yourself with updates and characters and words and you feed your digital self and it asks more of you and gives your body less in return. You get the latest upgrade. You become the new norm. You make yourself written letters instead of human flesh. You deceive yourself.

You play the zero sum game. Today another withdrawal tomorrow another the next day another still. Until you run dry as the ashes to ashes and dust to dust and that is your memory. You only have now and you squander now for later. And you step towards the light but it is only a reflection ahead and behind.

Word count: 725

Week II: Refining an idea

Ray Kurzweil is a fascinating dude. In his book, The Singularity is Near, he offers the following suggestion: Conceptualize the universe as bits of information (binary 1s and 0s, or even qubits) rather than particles of energy or matter. Every bit of energy or matter (or information, henceforth used interchangeably) can be represented with a digital value. We can use information to represent and measure fundamental particles - everything from DNA code in cellular life to the position of an electron (but not a dead cat in a box.) Information is perhaps the true building block of the universe. A bitwise representation of data - that is to say, a single digit, 0 or 1 - can be used to describe many things: the presence or absence of an instruction, a value, an object, a unit...

If we take Mr Kurzweil's suggestion, it opens a path for shifting ideas about how we use energy. In conversations about energy consumption, we're usually referring to wholesale consumption of natural resources. We burn fossil fuels and in trade we get power to keep the machines running and the blogs blogging. It's a remarkable process, and one that's largely taken for granted. But it has a major drawback - much of the energy present in fuel goes to waste.

For reference, let's discuss energy in terms of joules, which are units of heat, energy, or work. A gallon of gasoline is worth about 132 million joules. It takes 4.19 joules to heat 1mL of water by 1 degree Celsius. Moving around using a gallon of gas has an inherent drawback - it generates pollutants, and the whole process that converts gasoline to useful energy for your car's powertrain is perhaps 26% efficient at best. That means in the ideal case (which your car isn't), you're only getting 34.32 million joules out of that 132 million you paid about $5.35 for if you bought gas in Victoria today. Much of it is wasted as heat and combustion by-products. It's a long way from high efficiency.

In many cases, using information to move ideas makes more sense than using gasoline to move people. For instance, a meeting can take place over Skype or teleconference and vital information can be transmitted with a reduced energy cost. The number of joules per bit of information shared in that meeting is thereby decreased. If everybody drove, the meeting would be a lot less efficient. This approach has an important consequence - there is a surplus of energy relative to what would be necessary if everyone had met in person. Lower energy overhead leaves that surplus to be recycled into making the whole information process more efficient. The system becomes a positive feedback loop in which each cycle is potentially less costly than the one prior.

As the demand for lower-overhead meetings increases, the infrastructure necessary to transmit that information will become more efficient at an exponential rate. This tendency is described by Moore's Law, which was proposed in 1976. Moore has proven to be incredibly accurate in predicting that the processing power of computer hardware will tend to double every 18 to 24 months. In response, the cost in dollars and joules per bit of transmitted data will decrease at a correspondingly exponential rate. This graph shows the exponential growth in the number of transistors on a single microprocessor since 1971.

The key advantage in treating energy as information is that the byproduct of information is more information. Consider the simplified life cycle of a gallon of gasoline: mining or drilling for bitumen or oil, several stages of purification and refinement, then pipelining, tanker delivery, and finally point-of-sale transmission to the end user. The oil is extracted from a finite source, and each stage of its life has a certain energy cost and certain unwanted byproducts which will increase as the source is depleted. The machinery and infrastructure will require more maintenance as it ages. Thus the latent value of energy per gallon of gasoline is relatively less at each transition due to the high processing overhead.

By contrast, when data is processed, refined, then transmitted, the net information output is larger at each transition. The source will not be depleted since it can be copied non-destructively. With an ever-decreasing cost in joules per bit, data refinements open headroom to invest more energy in search algorithms, pattern recognition, and more efficient ways to extract meaningful information from massive quantities of data. Consider the Large Hadron Collider - in my opinion, the coolest experiment EVER - which generates 15 million gigabytes of data every year! The LHC's findings are open source and accessible worldwide. As that information is shared, analyzed and applied, we all benefit. A tank of gas gets you a few hundred kilometers, but a think tank full of scientists gets you a few hundred new developments, ideas, technological advances, and experiments.

Gallons of gas have a hard energy density limit - 132 million joules. Information density is increasing exponentially. Bits per square centimeter of computing real estate are now in the billions, and the cost of putting them there is lower than ever. Despite amazing advances, there is still the drawback of intensive resource extraction that's required to build information networks. But even that is changing - fiber optic networks are many orders of magnitude more efficient than traditional copper wire, and they're being installed around the globe at an amazing pace. The rate at which physical resources are being translated to information continues to increase exponentially, with a lower net energy cost with each development cycle.

A bitwise view of energy is an interesting paradigm because it shifts resource extraction from a destructive to a creative process. It rewards discoveries that increase access to information and overall information storage and transmission capacity. Although there are mathematical limits to information density and computational speed we've yet to reach them on a conventional scale. Ray Kurzweil's singularity theory suggests that past a certain limit, our capacity to compress data will make technology and biology indistinguishable as we begin to embed technology into ourselves - an altogether fascinating view of how our treatment of information will ultimately help us to transcend the physical limitations of hard matter.


Word count: 1,044

Week I: I probably don't have ADHD, and some other stuff about me

I'm going to write about myself. Today me, tomorrow you. I'm an interesting person, see? Just like everybody else. I'm paradox made flesh. I'm a book of cliches and well-worn phrases that constitute a biography. I'm full of unique thoughts, thought an infinite number of times by the infinite copies of me in this infinite universe. I'm a bag of meat and skin and bone. I'm beautiful inside and out, except when I'm not. I'm vain to think that you'd want to read about me. I'm smart to write about myself - it'll give my friends and family greater insight into my brain. I'm just trying to be honest. I'm just trying to let love in, like Nick Cave.

I'm young, but I've done things. Left home early and moved around and love and heartbreak and children and jobs and school and stuff. It makes me feel older than I am sometimes, but I hate saying that because it sounds like I'm trying to come off being all wise and worldly. I'm trying to be more child-like. Not that I'd hate to be seen as wise and worldly, but ironically, those who are genuinely wise and worldly would most likely be the last to tell you about it.

Life is deeply ironic. And fuck that hipster nonsense, that's not what I mean. I'm prone to say the best advice I've ever been given is this: never miss a good opportunity to keep your mouth shut. Here I go for another 1,000 words. Shut up, dude. It's the most intelligent thing a person has ever said to me. It's a good story, too. Those wise words were some of the only ones I heard come from the mouth of a grizzled old cowboy named Bill. I met Bill when I was guiding horseback rides through the mountains of southwest Alberta one summer. I lived at the horse camp and didn't shower for 12 days. Bill was still breaking horses at the age of 82, and rocked a handlebar moustache that would make lesser men cry bitter tears of inferiority. If Bill is alive, he's 94 years old. Probably hasn't spoken more than a few sentences since I saw him last. "Pass the potatoes," maybe.

Let's switch subjects, I'm good at that. Switched universities and majors 3 times so far. I like to pretend that I have ADHD. It's self-diagnosis, never verified by medical science. I fidget and drum on everything. Random outbursts every day. Sentence fragments. I sit at a desk for five seconds and have to stand up. Looks like an open-and-shut case. But I probably don't have ADHD. I just choose not to sit still and pay attention, right? I've made it this far without Ritalin. I'm trying to meditate more often to make it better. It's frustrating. It's entirely possible that I just need to grow the fuck up and quell my immature behaviour, and pull myself up by my own bootstraps, kid let me learn you a thing or two why back in my day.

I'm interested in everything and life is too short. I live several lives simultaneously. Musician. Father. Student. Worker. Housekeeper. Writer. Friend. Brother. The word "balance" is popular, but it doesn't capture the whole picture. Imagine your life is one of those big brass scales, like the one lady justice holds. Its arms and chains are irregular in length and design. Instead of two balances about a point of equilibrium, there are dozens. Here's a big bag of rocks, go balance it out. I don't want balance always. Chaos is beautiful. Moments of equilibrium are striking and rare and have pleasing symmetry because they're in contrast with the dissonance. Striving for balance is an exercise in futility and silly new-age pedantry. You don't get balance, you're deluding yourself. You don't have control over enough of the variables to make it balance. You still have to carry the big bag of rocks, but you're only allowed to distribute the ones at the top of the bag. Everything else is up to chance. The harmonious balance that I seek is to offset all the randomness with the liberating realization that the universe doesn't give a shit about my plans. See? Much better.

I have bad habits and I procrastinate. I've been handed every opportunity - scholarships, loans, caring instructors, the list goes on. I could sleep earlier, but I play guitar and sabotage my attention span with bite-sized internet humour. I could rise earlier, but I hit the snooze 6 times and forget my lunch when I leave. I talk about fixing these behaviours all the time, but I'm slow to adopt the proposed changes. I could publish a book with all the to-do lists I've left incomplete. My brain is a complex bureaucracy. Good ideas still need to run up the chain of command, and the guy at the top has veto power. Sometimes I'm self-disciplined enough to divert my energy into good habits. Sometimes I need the threat of punishment to get started, like with this blog. My friend Maggie will do something terrible if I don't publish on time. Friends are good for a lot of things. The really good ones are the friends who will call you on your bullshit. Listen to them. They love you, and they wouldn't lie to you.

I'm a drummer. I love music more than anything else in this world. I hear music every second of every day, and sometimes I have to play or sing along. I'm fully conscious of how ridiculous that sounds. I wouldn't change it for anything. I have a soundtrack to my life in every waking moment. My torso is a drum kit when I walk. The world is made of percussion. Desks, binders, notebooks, keyboards, railings, tables, and chairs are everywhere. Things have rhythms and pitches and melodies. Car tires harmonize with wet pavement and the beat changes when you step from the sidewalk onto the bus floor. Music is everything and everywhere, and the best part about being human is that we can touch it for just a moment and take an agonizingly short glance at its infinite beauty. And I'm fully conscious of how ridiculous that sounds, and I stand by it. And maybe I'll expand on that for an upcoming blog, but I'm over my word limit.

And that's me, more or less. Today me, tomorrow you.


Word count: 1,063