Oooo, That's Gonna Leave a Mark

I think about all the folks I’ve known over the eras, epochs, eons and millennia. Due to the wildly complicated, mobile, jitterbug-ish nature of this modern world, we fade in and out and sometimes just out of our friends and frenemy’s lives.

On most days, the tattoos they’ve left on me (not physical ones, mind you) poke up at odd moments, making me remember and smile.

Jen and I were telling another friend to meet us for drinks at The Frog and Peach. “That’s the name of the place? What a funny name!” Oh whoops no. One of the many tats left by Tom G. is that I now seem wholly unable to call a joint by its given name. I’m forever inventing aliases. The Fat Cat is The Obese Kitten. Captain Fishbones is Fish Brains. The Stockyard is The Meat Palace. The Frog and Peach? That’s The Fox and Hounds.

If you don’t show up where I’ve told you to meet us, well, it’s my fault. No actually, I grinningly, snarkingly blame Tom. You can join me and blame Tom too, if we can just figure out where we're really meeting.

My gross pedanticism about Martinis? (i.e., It’s gin (preferably Sapphire), very dry, olives. NEVER vodka -- that’s a cocktail not a martini, dammit!) Gregg left that tattoo.

My penchant for laying under grand pianos or on top of pipe organs while people are pounding out tunes, of course. I got turned onto experiencing music like this back in college when I was a music major. Doug, this tattoo’s artist, used to expound on the flaming, giant importance of feeling the music in your sternum -- “Now THAT’S real music!” He was a total Franz Liszt-head, a composer whose work always puts Bugs and Woody Woodpecker in my mind. This being an awesome-times-twelve kind of a thing!

My love for conversation as escalating free form fireworks of the imagination. Conversation like a fast forward Twla Tharp dance off between Nureyev and Baryshnikov by way of Bukowski. That’s just one of the tats my father left.

Ah the list can go on and on. Perhaps I’m no more than a collection of marks and impressions left by all I love and have loved. That's it! Frankenstein's personality!

Eh, I could do worse.

What marks, happy and otherwise, have your friends made on you?
Jung Lin performs Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2