So I misspelled 'korok' as 'koruk' in my username. A korok is a small forest spirit from the Zelda game series. In Breath of the Wild, they set up little hidden puzzles. Complete a puzzle and the korok will pop out and say "Ya ha ha, you found me!" and give you a korok seed, which is actually poop. They really tickle me.

Much like a korok I don't expect to be super useful here in gemini space. I'm not a programmer or hard into tech. I figured out a while back that I don't have the raw love of the intricacies of coding to make anything truly innovative. Back in the late 90s my first Real Job was working on a GIS project using arc/info on a unix platform. From that job I went to another working as an autocad tech for an architecture/engineering firm. And that's when I figured out I much preferred working with my hands and making a tactile product to sitting at a desk typing and clicking. So I made a break for it and went artsy. I worked in screenprinting and ended up running commercial embroidery machines. Making hats 'n stuff. That was fun because I learned to fix the machines and I taught myself how to digitize (turn an image into instructions for the machines to use to recreate the image in embroidery).

I'm a tattoo artist now, or at least I was before the plague. Right now I'm in limbo. I am fortunate to have a spouse with secure employment and we are in no danger of starving or having to live in a tent with the cats. That's more than a lot of people can say.

Weirdo news makes my ears prick up, so when China announced the lockdown right before the Chinese New Year, I knew the new pneumonia virus was likely to be a big deal. I figured the virus would likely come to the US, and I expected to have a 2-4 week lockdown while the government machinery spooled up and the CDC kicked into gear and figured out what measures to put in place. I expected life to change until a vaccine became widely available, but I never imagined the US response would be so pants-on-head stupid that I would lose the whole year.

So "the right way" to get started as a tattoo artist is to find someone to take you on as an apprentice. During the apprenticeship you work long hours and make nothing but tips until your mentor decides your work is good enough to take real clients. You would think tattooing would be easy (needle goes in ink, needle goes in skin, simple) but let me tell you, it is insanely hard. It is the hardest thing I have ever learned or done. Tattooers are to artists what special forces are to soldiers. I am 2 years done with a 3 year apprenticeship, so I was just getting to the point where I was feeling confident, taking clients, starting to make minimum wage levels of money. I've been stupid poor for 2 years, taking the bus because I gave up my car when we moved here (because the east coast has such great public transportation, right?), no free time to make any friends or pursue any old hobbies. I was starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. :-/

I live in an area that does care about the virus and was initially hard hit in the spring. Tattoo shops were shut down for 5 months. I don't mind that part. Tattooing is risky for spread, probably second only to dentistry/health care. I love tattoos but they are in no way essential. Nevermind that the sort of people who are hot to get tattoos in a pandemic aren't low risk people. In the last days before the county locked down, the shop I worked at was one of the few open. My mentor bragged that he was outside city limits so he could stay open, and we got flooded with a grab bag of nutjob randoms - the sort of clients too impatient to get tattooed at our shop normally. We aren't a street shop and our artists are almost always booked up. But all our good clients were cancelling their appointments due to covid ...

I gave my mentor a head's up on the pandemic in February. I saved him from spending $2k on a booth for the local tattoo convention (it was cancelled - the convention center was a field hospital on the event dates). I told him to stock up on supplies like gloves, needles, paper towels due to possible supply chain disruption. But I don't think he could wrap his brain around the impact. He yelled at us for cleaning in the days before lockdown, "scaring clients". He isn't the most stable person and the pandemic put him in a bit of a panic spiral. He blew up on the newest artist, who quit. The last days in the shop before lockdown were miserable, and I faked sick the last day to avoid going in. Sometimes your gut tells you when to duck out.

Even though tattoo shops were allowed to reopen in August, I haven't gone back to work. My spouse is going through a delicate interview process for his dream job. It's the culmination of the past 6 years or so of his life, and it's a really difficult job to get and this is the last time he can try. If I brought home the virus and it damaged his heart or lungs, it would end his chances. There's no way I am risking his dream for the small profit I might make. Thanks to the horror show that is our US healthcare system, I'm not interested in taking my chances with medical bills either. How insane is that? The bills scare me way more than the actual virus. I expect the county to lockdown tattoo shops again soon, and it's a giant headache when you have 2 weeks of appointments to reschedule with no idea when you might be available again. Like, fuck it. May as well chill until the winter wave ebbs. My "job" right now is not catching covid.

I feel pretty useless. I've never been unemployed this long, or been so dependent on a partner. I am limited to walking as transportation, so I can't even run errands properly. My mental health has not been good. I did not expect the US pandemic response to be this awful. I didn't expect so many people to actively champion cruelty and ignorance. It is a mental burden all by itself. I know we could have done so much better. This extra economic torture is not necessary, but we have to live it because we don't have a unified effort to take the virus seriously. Many people don't have the luxury of going without income, and our heartless incompetent government won't help. So it goes.

At the end of February I was on the bus to work and I was wondering to myself why the government wasn't testing, why they weren't stocking PPE, why they were so behind the curve. I couldn't figure it out. If I (a nobody) were tracking the news in January, surely the US intel agencies knew more about it sooner. The lack of action only made sense if they'd made a choice not to care. That's when it dawned on me that we were being sacrificed to Mammon. I'd always thought evil was a quaint conceit meant to keep people hooked on Christianity or Islam or whatever. Isn't "evil" just religious shorthand for "motives I don't understand and don't approve of"? Well, thanks to 2020 I now have a personal definition of evil. It's a thousand small acts of deliberate selfishness that result in people dying. It's looking at a spreadsheet of risk assessment and calculating profit points vs preventative costs vs fines/lawsuits. It's the slow erosion of the value of life, and the fractional acceptances we are encouraged to make everyday that push ourselves up a little higher and those "below" us a little lower. And I'm heartily sick of it.

I wanted to be a tattoo artist because I thought it was a skill that would be in demand regardless of climate change, zombie apocalypse, cyberpunk dystopia. People are still travelling thousands of miles to get tattooed the traditional way with sticks (tebori). People get tattooed in prison. Tattooing will survive an apocalypse and survive automation. I know they have a machine now that can "print" a tattoo on someone, but as someone who has worked with embroidery machines and dealt with the breakdowns and the misfires, and knowing how ridiculously hard even a small tattoo is to do well, there is absolutely no way I would let a machine with a needle and a preloaded design go hog on my body. Even if they do perfect the automation and set up shops in every mall, an automated tattoo will never have the same cachet as one done by hand. People will still go get tattooed with sticks, like prehistoric people did ten thousand years ago. Most likely, people will get a fugly automated garbage tattoo and then end up spending more to go to a real artist to fix it or cover it up. So automation just means more job security, probably.

But here I am in a pandemic ... not working.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what life will be like once the vaccine is in wide distribution. Certain things will snap back to "normal", but a lot of things won't, can't. I can't look at my country and its politics the same. I feel an urgency to make local community connections. I want to figure out a useful niche as an artist. I am unhappy with the focus on consumption and malignant capitalism. I have come to despise the "attention economy". I am not sure what it all adds up to, but I definitely feel like 2020 is a pivot point for me.

Maybe I'll become a human korok, and leave weird little puzzles for people to find and solve ...