Now, I Launch the Vessel into Uncharted Tides

Here's a brief history of the professions I have wanted to become in my lifetime.

If you have to start somewhere, why not here - Let's be real, tattooing and applying for an apprenticeship is really just one huge job interview (with a major practical as the price of admission).

Oh no, I'm a blogger now?

Isn't that a bad word?

Like just about every little boy in the world, I loved dinosaurs as a toddler.  It's either dinosaurs, or it's machinery.... Trains, trucks, diggers, backhoes, planes.  I was in the first camp.

By ScottRobertAnselmo - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, [Click Here]

The first subject I dove into was dinosaurs. Learning names like Styrachosaurus, Hypsilophodon, Pterodactyl and Archaeopteryx kept me sharp to details.  The difference between a Tyrannosaurs, an Albertosaurus, and an Allosaurus - were not lost on the eyes and mind of 3-ish/4-ish year old me - those are different lizards.

(Allosaurus puns, beside)

I wanted to be an archaeologist.
I didn't realize that I actually wanted to be a paleontologist....
That would have been a pretty sad realization upon receiving my degree.

The second profession that caught my attention was tattoo artistry.  My mom still maintains a Harley-Davidson to this day.  My dad sold his Road King when his eyes got too bad to feel safe operating a bike anymore.  I was practically induced by a late-term motorcycle ride, my dad took my mom out for a spin, and I was born the next day.

Safe to say, I'd been exposed to tattoo culture from an early point in my life.  My dad wears no ink, but my mom was tattooed before I was born.  Most of her biker friends and romantic interests after my father all had biker ink.

Remember those crude biker doodles?
Well, my mom gave me a collection of 4 3-ring binders, filled with tattoo flash.  The small kind, the probably bought-from-a-supplier kind, the kind you put in a xerox machine and increase the print size to fit the piece to stenciling.  An effort that she stands by as way to increase my interest in the arts.  It must have worked, because here I am, here this site is, and there's my portfolio across the room.

Drawing for a living was a perk, but even as a 5 or 6 year old, I was aware that a good artist could look like hell, and still make a living.  The world is a judgemental place, which is why the next profession appealed to me - Radio broadcasting.

I'm not really even entirely sure when, or how, but this was suggested to me multiple times as a growing youth.  My daycare provider told me this, I was told by teachers, some family members.  I thought that would be OK - especially when I first saw some of the radio DJ's in person, where I'd only heard their voices for years.  You could look like hell and still make a living.

Disc Jockey stayed in the back of my head a bit, and the next major movement of profession choice headed into the science of life - A marine biologist.  In the Mid-to-late '90's, I was not alone in this idea - for some reason, a ton of middle-Americans - living in landlocked Ohio - all wanted to be a marine biologist as working adults.  In my defense, the idea of being in the ocean daily was really intriguing.  Even today, if offered the choice of a vacation destination to the mountains, or the ocean, I'll pick the water feature 90% of the time.  Of course, you can just go to the Pacific NW and get both... but I'll pass on swimming there.

I suppose that as I entered middle school, I lost whatever interest in marine biology that I had found - and for a few years, nothing really raced forward to lead the charge.  This is when I learned a lot of life lessons and began to experiment with the things teens of my time tinkered with.

Smoking marijuana as a youth definitely re-awoke my artistic passions - but the circle hadn't become full quite yet.

In high school, I fell in love with Biology.  Not the simple stuff, but the really deep, organic machinery and the chemical processes fascinated me - even to this day.  With the foresight that college would be beyond my means and ability to focus, I still ventured into AP Bio as a Junior.  My teacher even cautioned that I did not take the class - he remembered me from Freshman year, and had just decided I would probably burn out of a college level course.

Tell me I cannot do something, please.
You'll fuel the fire and I'll succeed to spite you.

Mr. Austin made a conditional offer:  If I had a grade lower than an 85% B - I'd have to drop after first term.  As an AP Course, this would actually be an "A" on the grading rubric - but since there was so much information to fit into the curriculum before the standardized testing in May - falling behind would be equivalent to failure.  When I was maintaining an A in class (unweighted) - Mr. Austin recognized my efforts and I continued this path... which brought me to the next profession choice.

If I were to go to college, I was going to go for Mycology.  Who cares if science wouldn't pay, I was more interested in exploring the true chemical chimeras of our planet - mushrooms.  The fungal ability to create novel, complex chemical structures from base organic materials in a way that modern science and technology can't replicate is bewildering.  I was fascinated, intrigued and wanted to study this, to know more - the reward for me would be the journey, not the destination.

Roughly, it looks like this:
Archaeologist (Paleontologist) >> Tattoo Artist >> Radio DJ >> Marine Biologist >> Undecided/Artist >> Rockstar >>  Mycological Scientist >> ???

Shit, I graduated, so now what do I do?

I started working... One crap job to the next.  It's what teens do.
At age 20, I stumbled into Whole Foods Market in Dublin.  I aggressively pursued being hired, and so it happened.  During my third interview, when extended the job, my new boss told me I had 30 days to impress him.  So I worked on his team for 2 years, then moved to grocery, becoming the Bulk Foods Buyer.  I met the mother of my son during my second year filling that post - and when I was ready to do more, I took a promotion and moved to Lexington, KY - as an Associate Team Leader.  There was no Team Leader and I was fast-tracked to leading the team.

When you run a department in WFM - you're almost an SBO. Almost, not quite... but that's how you're treated by your bosses and their bosses (and their boss's bosses).  A liberating feeling in the corporate world of interconnected command posts.  You were encouraged to be proactive and fix problems, you didn't need to run everything up the chain of command.

Whole Foods is an ink-friendly kind of employer - the only limitations being: No facial tattoos & no visible, offensive tattoos.  At this point, my upper back and shoulders had already been pretty well covered, with wisps of visible ink poking beyond shirt collars.  Meeting peers in other stores, in other regions, finding new regulars in my stores - but I began to see a lot of ink and to talk with the wearers.  Always asking where did they get the work, who did it, sharing my ink, just talking up the process.  It was a cool way to learn the local shops in Lexington - identifying consistently strong work coming out of the same shops time and again.

When I got my first tattoo, I asked my artist about his journey... I recall being really interested in learning more - but I made no delusions, Whole Foods Market was a master that paid me, and one which had accepted my visions as working with theirs.  Never in my wildest dreams had I hoped to find an apprenticeship at this time, but the thought definitely crossed my mind.

I stayed with WFM for a total of almost 7 years.  Just after my son was born and right on the verge of our 2 year anniversary in coming to Lexington, we returned to Columbus.  I took a leap of faith with my new position here in town, and it turns out I got dealt shit-hand, after shit-hand even as I failed to play any of those salvageable cards to effective use.  One year into my new store, I left WFM - frustrated by the overwhelming series of events that brought this to be, and reeling from the loss of my 5 and 10 and 20 year planned ambitions.  What had been a sure thing, had just crumbled before my face, was dust before the broom, I was starting a new chapter.

"Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing...
It's only after we've lost everything, that we're free to do anything."
     --Tyler Durden

I was now a stay at home dad.

From primary provider, to full-time dad-mode.

A thing which I can admit, had never even visited the possibility of my wildest dreams.
I had fantasized about tattooing... but being a stay at home parent had never even crossed my mind.

The trade-off, I got to spend nearly every waking hour with my most favorite person in the world, learning lots of non-verbal communication with human-pupae.  Instead of talking to adults, I was care-taking.  Instead of making money, I now had spare time to work back into art... This is when and where I would start making resin castings, and making designer art toys.

We moved to Philadelphia, PA within six weeks of tendering my resignation.

Philly taught me a lot of things.  A lot.
So much so, that it's a possible topic for more ramblings, later.

I ended up working into a job by way of a connection from WFM, back in Lexington.  From home, I processed orders on my computer, and for a time, I made enough money to prevent my debt from swallowing me whole.

One year after moving to Philly, we packed it all back up (minus a truckload of cruft), and headed back to Columbus. 

After the lay of the land was determined, and we settled into life back home - I began to focus on art again. 

The dream... the dream which I had dreamt up, but never really been bold enough to imagine becoming reality - well, I was now formulating a strategy to capture that hill.

If I really was free to do anything, then leaving WFM was no curse - it was the blessing of freedom.  If I was going to find a mentor to hire me into a tattoo apprenticeship, what would that path look like?  How was I going to get there?  What is the coin for this new land?
 

Archaeologist (Paleontologist) >> Tattoo Artist >> Radio DJ >> Marine Biologist >> Undecided/Artist >> Mycological Scientist >> [WFM Eclipses all] >> Tattoo Artist*

So, in a long, round-about way, here we are at the full circle point.

Next time, I'll post about my plan.
Not a plan, THE Plan (Rather, the Visions from Before, to get us to the present-now).

*Although, I never did want to be a Paleontologist again, it might be apt to say that Biology has always captured my attention even throughout the whole of the circle.  Check out my Macabre-Abstract Gallery which features extensive use of human anatomy in intriguing ways.