If this quote had ever entered my ear it immediately exited the other ear. But when I recently read in the NewYorker that RF Kuang has it tattooed on her wrist I realized the quote will be sticking with me this time.
show don’t tell
walk the talk
you gotta walk it like you talk it or you’ll lose that beat
Authentic authenticity means something to me. My dad once complimented my innate bullshit detector. Here’s some further reading on the subject that recently added itself to my reading list:
22 Heather shared these photos with me in an email. She knows I like arrows. When I saw the thumbnail images, I thought they were cool.
Arrows are cool. I will flip through catalogs of traffic signs and scroll through sites that sell arrow signs. I find arrow signs all around on the ground and offer them a new home. The walls of my batcave are covered with arrows. There are arrows tattooed on my arms and legs so I don't lose them. There are arrows silkscreened on my hoodies so I know which way to go. There are arrows all around. So many in fact, they tend to blend in and become the scenery.
When I started looking at the full size images of these, I realized they're more than cool, they’re really really really cool. Actual arrows on asphalt enhanced by Thai Bui the artist with chalk, adding drop shadows and highlights.
East Bound in the bike lane one day. A bike lane I’ve ridden countless times before. So many times I subliminally know when the bumps are bumping, the cracks are cracking, I know what’s down there, because I’ve been there, done that. I post up out of the saddle and absorb the bumps right in time as they’re bumping. All muscle memory. No thought bandwidth used. No static at all. I’m pretty proud of my lizard brain. But just as I’m patting myself on the back the front wheel hits a chunk of wood, hits it hard, a chunk that’s not supposed to be there. I snap out of my stupor and the universe says, “don’t get too cocky bro, I’m the one telling you how it is”
This scrap of cardboard is the jumbo postcard of the day. Soon to be hand-delivered via electric ass bathtub to the Medicinal Herb Garden Guy via the Life Sciences Greenhouse.
The gold cow is on the fence, looking one way, then the other. She cannot decide which side has the greener grass. All the while she’s hearing her grandma’s voice in her head, repeatedly repeating reminders to be careful what you wish for...
got my hands on a rather large number of planning committee blue ribbons with built-in adhesive strips to adhere to your name tag at the convention or meeting or large event that required a planning committee to plan. So as I walk around and mingle and schmooze you’ll clearly see my name MATT PINTER and that I’m obviously a proud member of the planning committee.
In this package there are several hundred perhaps a thousand of these blue ribbons. Why would I buy it? You might ask. Well I bought it because it was there. Because it was 50 cents. Because I could take them out of context and put them back in some how some where some time.
These ribbons have been sitting here for a few weeks, waiting for me to deploy them in a new and interesting way. But a little while back I gave about 25% of them to 22 Heather and said “what would you do with a bunch of planning committee blue ribbons?”
Several days later Heather presented me with a little cabin in the woods down by the river made with cardboard and a healthy heaping helping of planning committee blue ribbons, as you can see in the photo above.
Tuesday I got this matted & framed photo at UW Surplus. Not for the photo, for the frame. However, the photo has since haunted me and I’m not sure I want to mess with its mojo. I may just keep it intact as a true 1987 artifact. I can always find another thriftstore frame for the project I’m envisioning.
The more I read about this quintet, the more respect I have for the frame.
Philip A. Trautman was a distinguished professor in the UW Law school for 50 years. He passed away in 2019.
Mark E. Abhold fell off the internet, perhaps in an Applied Physics military secret nuclear engineering way. Let me know what you know about him.
Ann L. Darling is in the UW Communications Hall of Fame. She went on to teach at the University of Utah for years.
Paul Pascal was a distinguished Classics professor at UW for 38 years. He passed away in 2015.
Loveday Conquest is currently Professor Emeritus in School of Aquatic and Fishery Science. She taught at UW from 1978 - 2014. Even though she retired before my time, her name vaults her into the top 5 on my list of UW faculty-staff names that float through my vision as an electric ass bathtub mail man.
My mental list includes names like:
Bo Woo
Jade Cox
Velocity Rose
Pepper Schwartz
Tres Tracy Ballon
Sherri VanSickle
Ursula Elspeth Owen
Lochlan Michael Hickok
Andrea Chateaubriand
Loveday Conquest is an all-time-great name.
PS::: I also found a Grinnell College T-shirt at UW Surplus in my size for $1. Sometimes you’re not looking for something, but it’s looking for you like the Ace of Spades.
A few days ago one of my coworkers discovered a dusty old large box of paperclips in a storage cabinet at the mother ship. It was placed there years ago by a former government worker.
Yesterday I dug my hand into the box for no real reason. Just to hold a heaping helping of old paper clips. Just because I could. This of course, inspired me to make a chain of clips. Which in turn brought to mind a little ditty I wrote 17 years ago when I was a shit-talking legal messenger, making shit-talk observations of various government workers, specifically King County Superior Court clerks.
Here and now, seventeen years later, I’m a shit-talking government worker observing other government workers. As I taped a chain of paperclips to a pen I smiled the smile of a completed round trip. Out & back. Full circle. Always on time. Never working late. Getting the job done. See my pen-paperclip display below.
This guy Alex, actually was your Bucky back in the days when he was a teenager, before he had status but he probably had a pager. He did the Bucky’s Blood run all over First Hill to various hospitals, here & there, out & back. Towing the biohazard insulated trailer, until he ditched it when no one was looking and just chucked the shit in his bag.
A while back when we were talking about the good old days and he told me about Bucky’s I knew I had to make him a Bucky Blue t-shirt.
He was wearing it today when I spotted him in situ and got a photo. Alex rides an electric ass bathtub to work sometimes with his dog up front. Because it’s a quality of life issue and when you’re the building coordinator, every day is bring-your-dog-to-work day.
All I wanted was a pepsi. When I say pepsi, I mean IPA. But really all I needed was a birthday balloon or two or three. As those in the know know the dollar store is the place to go for helium birthday balloons.
While finding the balloons some hummingbird stickers found me.
I wasn’t planning on a limited run series of hummingbird postcards, it just came to be.
This book of short stories jumped into my hands out of the little free library. Then I looked it over and learned Charles Johnson is a professor emeritus of English at UW where he taught creative writing from 1976 until 2009.
I’m not a dust jacket fan so I ditched it. Then I added some crows feet because I’m a crow fan and that plain white cover sans jacket was sad.
These stories would hold my attention regardless of the author. But the fact that Johnson is a UW badass makes it even more interesting to me as I schlepp it around campus in an electric ass bathtub and read a short story now and then, here and there, here and now.
As work progresses on this work in progress, I recently added a zero. Because, as you know, it all added up to zero. Then I created an equation bottom-line-underline from a vacuum cleaner belt and a plus sign from some heat-shrink tubing. A short while later Junior-Junior said “those don’t add up to zero unless you make the 5 and the 8 negative”
My brain was running Public Enemy and his brain was running the numbers, doing the math. He also quickly mentally calculated the total MSRP for all seven sevens that Steve Young recently gifted me.
Spot on.
The ceramic heads above the Channel Zero addition equation don’t have much to do with it. They were just there first and proximity leads to assumptions. Your brain invents connections where there are none.
Everything is a work in progress. Somewhere along the lines of expansion or contraction. Red shift. Blue shift. Renewal. Decay. Layers. Iterations. Additions. Subtractions. Positive. Negative. It all adds up to zero.
Fourteen years ago I made a silkscreen of the slippery-when-wet bike safety sign (if you speak the lingo you know it's W8-10 bro) Yesterday I made myself another black t-shirt with it and it came out OK. But when the silkscreen was still wet I slathered it onto a campus map that was sitting around. And that [map + sign] got me more excited than the t-shirt. The front hub just happened to land in the middle of Red Square. I couldn't have lined that up if I tried.
Bob Ross would say it's less of a logical progression and more of a happy little accident.
Yesterday I got seven sevens from Steve hand-delivered all the way from Rip City. Each digit is hand-painted with unique color combinations. Each digit also has two kick-ass magnets installed.
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