The pocket program for this weekend is now available. Pages 47 through 59 are the pullout grid, which I’ve now printed and we will peruse on the airplane Thursday.

Tonight: Combichrist, Imperative Reaction, and Modulate at the Oriental Theater.

Tomorrow: The annual packing panic.

Thursday-Monday: Dragon*Con.

All work and no play? Fuck that noise.

You should come out and play tonight … there will be a sub Quizmaster next week while I’m at Dragon*Con.

Geekz rule.

We walked into the tattoo shop on Central that warm, spring afternoon in 1993 and met with one of Albuquerque’s three known tattoo artists. There were probably others, but there were only two shops in town at the time. We were at Fine Line, in their ramshackle building near San Mateo.

The artist we met with, J.B. Jones, took our ideas - mine for an ouroboros (the ancient symbol of a snake eating it’s own tail), his for the same but with two snakes (like the cover of the book in The Neverending Story) - and created pieces that would work with ink on skin.

Old-timers in the ‘Burque will have heard of J.B. - the people he influenced or mentored include Chris Partain and J. Ward down there. While he worked, we wandered the shop and looked at all the flash art. A cockroach skittered across the floor and J.B. nonchalantly stepped on it, scooped it up, and placed it in a mailing envelope. We looked at him, puzzled, and he told us he was going to mail it to a fellow tatto artist in another state as a joke. We laughed and shrugged, he finished the art and started his work on us.

Within a couple of hours, we had our rings permanently imbedded on our skin. It was a few more months before we were married, but we always joked about how the tattoos were our wedding rings, since we didn’t wear one on our fingers.

I’ve always loved the symbol of the ouroboros. It is balance; the snake consumes itself and grows from the sustenance. It is unity; it is a symbol of connection. It is infinity; it never ends. It has been traced back to two historical interests of mine: Ancient Egypt and Norse mythology.

I was divorced from the person who shared my ring tattoo in 2000, but what convinced me to save the ouroboros tattoo had little to do with keeping a torch lit for someone who was long gone. Rather, I wait for those little sychronicities that happen to all of us (if we’re paying attention). This time it started in 2002, when I ran across the ancient alchemical symbol for purification:

I was immediately drawn to it and knew, one day, it would end up permanently on my body somewhere. Earlier this year, I began researching the ouroboros and found it was once used an alchemical symbol for purification. Interesting …

Then last month, on one of our so-hot-I’m-wearing-a-halter-top-I-don’t-care-who-sees-me days, a homeless man on the 16th Street Mall - and I am not making this up - walked behind me for a moment and said, “You should purify yourself of that tattoo.”

Yes. I needed to cover up the one. But I opted to replace it with another:

For some reason, I had to get this one first, so for about a week I walked around with the old and the new on my back. The new one isn’t quite done; I want to get the symbol of Inanna tattooed in the center of the snake. (Those who know me best will know why.)

This past Monday, I purified myself of the other snake:

I’ve been drawing lotus flowers since I was in elementary school. The pattern I chose was one I drew when I was about 10, recently unearthed in my excavations of our attic storage space. It is not finished, either; I want the purification arrow in the center, and only then can it be filled in with color.

We all have our purification rituals. Some take baths, some go to confession. This one was, for me, one of the most satisfying.

Well, at least of the ones I’ve done alone.

I daresay I know a lot of girls like her, because from her photo, she looks like a happy, beautiful, 20-something goth chick.

She’s dead today.

She and her boyfriend, Rob Maltby, were attacked by a group of 15 to 17 year olds, who beat them both and stomped on their heads and their necks.

Because Sophie and Rob are goth.

I am sitting in front of my computer, nearly speechless, wondering how someone could have so much hate for the way a person looks or for the music they enjoy, or how they could be so ignorant as to want to kill someone for being different.

And yes, I want their assailants to suffer. The ability to forgive is a trait I refuse to share with savages.

The BBC story is here.

The Telegraph story is here.

There but for the grace of …

The cover story in this week’s Westword is a lovely treatise about the pub quiz scene in Denver, including a great pic of John Dicker and Joel Peach, the co-founders of Geeks Who Drink.

Yes, that’s the very same Geeks Who Drink. who hired me to Quiz Mistress Monday nights at the British Bulldog and who’ve successfully brought the quiz to Albuquerque earlier this month.

The article’s pretty nifty, though I’m sure it was a Wednesday night that Mike Jones guest-hosted a round. I know because I was there. I gave the man a big hug and thanked him for doing what he did.

Wish I had more time to play.

Even though his book was written as a rather tongue-in-cheek satire of the subculture, at least they bothered to get the goth viewpoint. They could have left the viewer with the headline “Goth Murder Madness” and nothing else.

Short version (just Voltaire):

Long version (more background on the murder story):

We always run into him at Dragon*Con (told you I’d work in mentions of it constantly) and this time I’ll thank him for seeming to take FOX Noise seriously and for being a rational, intelligent voice on the subject.

It’s so easy when you’re evil.

I’ve been busier than ever, so the posts here have suffered a bit. So has my disposition, because writing is the best release for me.

Still, I’m very proud of the work I have been doing, especially with getting the company’s website online and doing it without a “real” web design program. Yes, the bastards at Microsoft have once again made my life hell for about a week, but now I have a valid copy of Dreamweaver. There will be no looking back.

I am also teaching myself QuickBooks. Thanks to the math it automatically does for you, we are now aware the shows we’re producing are not as far in the red as we thought. This is a good thing.

I’ve got four more pages to get together for www.amarangroup.com and we’re headed to L.A. tomorrow for other business.

And, lest you think I forgot, we head out to Dragon*Con on the 30th.

Like I’d let a post slip by without mentioning it again.

Yes. Yeeessss. YEEEESSSSSS.

Mr. Cheney’s office responded:

He was not vice president at the time, it was after he was secretary of defense. I don’t have any comment.

Let’s do some White House math:

Don’t misunderstand me: I am a conservative. Not a “family values” or Xtian conservative, but an every man for himself, anti-union, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, stay the hell out of my private life, anti-welfare state conservative.

There is no bleeding heart here, but I know WRONG when I see it.

Too bad the majority of us are kept so fat, dumb, and happy that there is no uprising, no outrage at the metric shit ton of WRONG this administration has accomplished.

If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.

I keep my ideas and patterns for my tattoos a few years to ensure they will appeal to me for a long time to come. I work and re-work them, enlist the help of artist friends, search the web for more or better ideas, and generally make sure the ink I get stews within my brain and scratches at my soul for a long, long time before I permanently modify my body with it.

When my mom died in late 1997, I knew what tattoo pattern I wanted in her memory within months, but I did not have the work done until 2004. That’s the kind of wait I mean. It may seem like an impulse buy when I finally get off my ass to get the work done, but there’s been a minimum of 3 year’s time between my idea for a tattoo and the real thing.

A tattoo is forever. The research and planning for one should take at least 1/2 as much time.

More than the time, however, is finding a good artist who’s affiliated with a studio that’s really clean, properly outfitted, and run like a business rather than a fly-by-night organization. So, though I’ve known what I want for my next 5 tats since we moved to Denver, it’s taken 3+ years for me to find an artist and a shop combination I like.

But I finally did and, thanks to Dave Carbajal at Celebrity Tattoo (specifically the Tennyson location), I have 1/2 of the work I need done before heading out to Dragon*Con in a couple of weeks. The rest will (hopefully) be done by this weekend to give it all plenty of time to heal before the trip.

I’ll load a photo later.