Yearly Archives: 2007

Rockstar Jeff

Thumbnail: Muted colours
Thumbnail: Sun shot
Thumbnail: Soft focus
Thumbnail: The chest tattoo
Thumbnail: Two star tattoos
Thumbnail: Blackness

I asked Rockstar Jeff, an old source of envy, if I could take a few por­traits of him.

Jeff’s very pho­to­genic, but he does­n’t agree. I’m 75% prep and 25% bad-ass, where­as he’s 75% bad-ass and 25% prep. Sometimes we joke about trad­ing styles because there’s a mix in each of us, and we always like where the oth­er ones goes with it. The truth of the mat­ter is that I could nev­er pull off his style. Anyone can do prep, but he’s got the right face, the right clothes, the right atti­tude for hard­core.

This was his hit sin­gle.

He’s the gui­tarist and scream­er. The band broke up, but he’s cur­rent­ly explor­ing oth­er musi­cal oppor­tu­ni­ties. It’s inter­est­ing to hear his oth­er projects; he’s always the front­man, but he adjusts his singing style to the band while adding his own edge.

Tattoos:

Stars on wrist

This was a mutu­al tat­too done with a friend (his “right hand” per­son), which is why there are two of them. His friend has the same tat­toos on her wrist.

Crows on right arm

As the crow is the uni­ver­sal sym­bol of bad luck, Jeff got each crow to remind him of a hard time in his life. Each one of them sig­ni­fy a moment. There’s one red one with a nail going through it, as a sym­bol that his bad luck is hope­ful­ly behind him (but he says it isn’t yet).

Daisy on right arm

The daisy is his mom’s flower. It’s not real­ly wilt­ed or bro­ken (which is what I thought at first), it’s sim­ply miss­ing petals. He got this at a time when he was real­ly angry at her, which is why it’s red. He had drawn two years ear­li­er, but only decid­ed to get it inked when she kicked him out of the house, to remind him of the hard love of fam­i­ly.

Stars on elbows

There’s actu­al­ly one larg­er star on each elbow, with the ini­tials of peo­ple com­ing out of them. They’re the first tat­toos he ever got, to remind him of the tough lessons that he’s gone through with or from these peo­ple.

Heart on chest

This one was inspired by his mom. He was mak­ing mak­ing some fool­ish deci­sions around 18, and his mom remind­ed him that he should be hap­py with him­self when he looks in the mir­ror, that there should be no hid­ing from the truth, and he should always be true to him­self.

The word “truth” is sur­round­ed by peri­ods to empha­size that it’s a strong fact in itself. The word “self” does­n’t start with a peri­od because the heart is a part of the sen­tence.

The only change he would make is to have it drawn back­wards, so he could read it when he looks in the mir­ror.

Guest Entry: Inspiration is Everywhere

This is a guest entry by fel­low 9rules mem­ber, Dave Seah. We start­ed this entry swap­ping ven­ture as an exer­cise in writ­ing out­side of our nor­mal styles. It also let us see how dif­fer­ent­ly we would explore a top­ic that was defined by a sin­gle sen­tence, which was “Inspiration is every­where”.

I approached Dave because he writes with a deep insight in his words while pre­sent­ing it with a light can­dor that draws the read­er in. Not only do I admire his writ­ing style and con­tent, I’m envi­ous of his abil­i­ty to come up with cre­ative, phe­nom­e­nal ideas. I’m glad that he agreed to par­tic­i­pate in this exer­cise, and leave his words and ideas as part of my per­son­al jour­ney.

You can read my take on the sub­ject at Dave’s site here.

If I were in your shoes and got hit with an hap­py-sound­ing phrase like INSPIRATION IS EVERYWHERE, I’d men­tal­ly spring into one of three mind­sets: 1. Skepticism 2. “Amen, Brother!” or 3. Apathy. I’d also make a few assump­tions: that the inten­tion behind such a procla­ma­tion was to be inspi­ra­tional in itself. Furthermore, the meta-assump­tion is that we’re all look­ing for it, or need it real bad.

Continue read­ing “Guest Entry: Inspiration is Everywhere”…

Give Me One More Day

I’ve been bit­ing off more than I can chew.

I used to enjoy my qui­et, lazy, relax­ing nights where I could sit down and write, but chances for cre­ativ­i­ty, expres­sion, socia­bil­i­ty have recent­ly been sprout­ing up every­where. These oppor­tu­ni­ties that don’t come around often, so I force myself to take the ini­tia­tive before they’re gone.

Tomorrow.

Letting Go of Bronwen

Bronwen start­ed dat­ing anoth­er guy.

It’s fun­ny, my first reac­tion is to think anoth­er guy, as if we’re still dat­ing our­selves. I sup­pose our rela­tion­ship has nev­er been con­ven­tion­al, but that’s what makes it so spe­cial. We still spend our week­ends togeth­er. We still talk on the phone for hours with­out actu­al­ly talk­ing. We’re close enough that I’m com­plete­ly com­fort­able around her, enough for me to let my guard to go down.

It’s made me real­ize how pro­tec­tive I still am of her, how upset I’ll be if she gets hurt. I think of all the things I could have done bet­ter, and hope this guy can treat her bet­ter than I did.

I have all these mixed feel­ings about it though. I’m wor­ried that I may lose my friend, but I’m glad there’s some­one to make her hap­py. In the end, I know I can’t be self­ish. Letting go of her the first time was hard enough.

Doing it again does­n’t make it any eas­i­er.