T1 + T2 = Free

      There's something to be said about a clean slate. Possibility. Freedom. When you've lived in one place for long enough time you start to not see the little nuances and jems of your immediate environment. Things quickly blurr and fade together into the background making your day very much about the destination and not the journey. Before you know it you're leaving for work knowing that when your shift ends the sun will be down already and the day will be gone...rolling into the impending dawn if you're ready for it or not. And this loop will go round and round throughout the work week until shit goes numb and you can no longer see clearly or remember what day it is. It's a shockingly hopeless perspective and a dangerous one to lock into. Fight the fight people. Don't see life through my eyes. It's a dangerously sarcastic approach to things laced with humor. Dark humor. Beware. How many folks feel a little nauseous come Sunday afternoon when they think about the early Monday alarm? Gazillions perhaps? And how many people have found a way to make a living doing something that brings them undeniable happiness? I wonder about those statistics. All this in the name of money for movement and ultimate survival. Saving money in this honeycomb metropolis is tricky and I am failing miserably. My parents are both about sixty and are just now talking about leaving the country for the first time in their lives. They have been pedaling pointlessly around in the American hamster wheel of doom that comes with two busted weeks a year to call a vacation where they pretend to relax. Usually those days are broken up and being used for emergencies like attending to ailing parents out of state anyway. The company my father has worked for for over thirty-one years gave him a disposable camera for his three decades of hard labor and service and a coupon for half-off at the Copper Cellar restaurant on the UT strip. My father's arm is presently dangling in a sling with nine months of recovery ahead of him. How can the company's workman's comp division deny an poor guy who's bicep muscle was just bolted and drilled into his arm bone in hopes that he will one day be able to reach above his head and pull his shirt off or put deodorant on again without assistance? Time to move to Canada. Booo to the blue collar rape and nonexistent appreciation for labors lost on assholes. Booo to the fuckers that give my sweet little mom a hard time as she struggles to take messages and act as slave and secretary to the grown up frat boys of Knoxville's transportation and roads department.  I will kill them for belittling a sixty year old woman that has already had two kids and two surgeries for carpel tunnel injuries in both her wrists. It's time to be kind.

 

        I just landed at Newark airport and made the horrible mistake of arranging a Blue Bus Line shuttle to my apartment to save some money. It was torture and unbelievably unorganized but I ended  up sitting next to a young painter from Warsaw who had never been here before and was bubbling over with excitement as we approached the city at a glacial creeping pace. I shocked even myself as I started answering some of her questions layered in years of jade. She said a few things that resonated deeply and called my ass out in a polite foreign kind of way. She said, "Maybe you need a new attitude?" It was a harsh translation but indeed it was true. Then I went on to talk about how easy it is to get distracted with surviving in a city like New York and she abruptly interrupted me with an intense "NO!.....No excuses for loosing sight of your personal artistic journey...none. I do not understand this!"  BAM!  I immediately tapped out and realized that I had something to learn from this person right then and there. She then handed me a card that had a self portrait....in the nude....wearing only Michael Jackson's red leather jacket with her contact info on it. And she wonders why I want to run from the suburban hills and set my dancebelt on fire.

           
              My brother is presently rolling his way down to the tippy tip of South America on a 1970 something motorcycle, unchaining his Phoenix, and creating the meat that will subtly feed him with sweet memories of the spontaneous adventures of his youth. These will be the images he will savour throughout his old age like a precious personal collection of private flashbacks, images fierce and tumbling and as rocky as a Tennessee country road. These priceless jems will stay frozen in his mind like it was yesterday and only he will have access to these secret adventure files. Life through my brother's eyes is a world in 3D, something to be touched and tasted. IMAX wishes it could capture and recreate Jason's perspective on the big screen. One day he will be able to say "There was this one time I ran into a barbed wire fence while running from a gang in Nicaragua " or, "Once I couldn't leave my tree cabana because there was a big ass snake wrapped around the ladder." Stories of Dreams! The tip of Tankersley's ice burg is more interesting than Kim Kardashian's latest black weenier or Tori and Dean's latest downsy moment. He is alive and burning, pushing onward at whatever mile per hour into an exciting world of simple choices and unlimited possibility, staying in South American "hotels" for the whopping price of $2.25 a night and probably eating like a homeless Wolfgang Puck off the grill he has welded to the back of his motorcycle. He will never regret, nor will he ever wonder what if he made that cross county (excuse me) trans-continental trip of dreams more than once. I'm hungry for grilled motorcycle insta-steaks and the wind burning my cheeks and forehead while bugs splat hard and frequently on my plastic helmet mask. Word to the wise: keep your mouth shut! The next time I own a bike I will either be able to afford a garage or have a private one. No more moving it back and forth for super early alternate street cleaning and worrying about dealing with pissy jaded cops writing tickets as easily as they dip doughnuts. Trips like the one T1 and Mike are on is nothing but god-like and it gets my blood pumping in a different kinda way. I think if folks never take trips and travel they start to forget that the world exists beyond their immediate bubble like a 212 zip code. I wanna go further than the NYC subway can take me and I want a sweet break from all of the desperate urban characters that daily make up my dirty little Manhattan play. The grass always seems to be greener in South America doesn't it?

                  

Say It Like You Mean It

  I've very recently had a huge realization when it comes to my flaky New York friends. A conformation is exactly the same thing as a cancellation in these here parts and I find that no matter the occasion, be it a birthday dinner or a sensible coffee, people's true colors come out when the stakes aren't high. Out of town? No problem. East Harlem? Go kill yourself! My girl Steph showed up drenched in the pouring rain from a long exhausting day of teaching pillates and yoga with probably a dance class or twenty thrown in there somewhere. In between eating cotton balls dipped in Splenda and walking her albino chihuahua of dreams, this little dancer-dancer runs a minute to minute marathon of modern dance rehearsal...yoga....styling band photo shoots....and just plain radiating pure goodness out into the universe 24/7. She's the busiest bitch I've ever known but nonetheless she showed up completely soaked, disheveled, and wearing (or faking through the exhaustion) a huge smile from ear to ear with a desert trey in hand. It was my birthday and she was the ultimate trooper hailing all the way from the ass crack of Brooklyn itself, proving to me that love trumps laziness any day. I'm guilty of it myself, the ol' city flake out. But you never really know how bailing on something seemingly insignificant (such as some body's big day) might forever alter how they view you when it's time for the second round of invites to go out.

    And around it goes...the sickening game of getting guilted to death for not making more of an effort to be part of someone's life. We all know the type; the person who upon seeing you enter a bar or restaurant instantly unleashes a guilt trip of the likes you haven't seen since the last time you saw that particular person. In my opinion this approach ironically makes me want to put even more time and space between me and guilt trip Mcgee. Don't confirm attendance to my special day then never even bother to show, much less cancel, because realistic cooking requires some loving consideration. Though I did truly enjoy the intimate company of my select VIPs that consisted of lovely ladies from Paris, Austria, Tennessee, and the outer boroughs of Brooklyn! These divas would've showed up if they had to thumb a ride from Mars and wild horses could not hold back my extreme gratitude that I was guided through my thirty two year transition with such grace at my side. Love is Michaela and Elodie schlepping over 12 hours on a shady bus from Tennessee just for me. Brooklyn = Tokyo as far as I'm concerned on a dirty, rainy Wednesday night. And them riding a charter bus for that long was salvation for me. It was Charlie and his literal angels sipping wine into the night and savoring the Tankersley not-so-secret Cajun shrimp enchiladas recipe until we almost burst open like gluttonous, giggling pinatas.

             I'm completely at fault for putting too much pressure on my friends to appear like Houdini just in time for the little desert trey of mini cakes, creme brules, and of course my favorite fat girl weakness...tiramisu, that Miss Sutherland lugged through the sludgy Harlem puddles and ghetto down pour of doom. These girls are the shining example of what a true friend is made of. The disappointment of the no-shows has been stewing in me long enough to string together a blog about it. I thought I could be bigger than this but alas, I'm just a pissed off homosexual with anger management issues that strangely enough considers his friends a family. I've found that to be a dangerous crutch and a huge mistake. Any person you hold up to an unreachable standard will fall short eventually. That is the case with myself most of the time. These friends are plagued with the same inconsistencies and flaws that put me into that category as well. I want my actor friends to at least have the creativity to feign an illness or concoct some semi believable story. Just because you have a million or so friends on Facebook doesn't remove you from the hermit list either. In fact it puts you at the head of that homeschool line and inches you dangerously close to becoming an out of control Hoarder of blue and white china and old, unread, dusty piles of New York Times. It's a slippery, scary slope to one day waking up to realize you've become an isolated cat lady in NoHa that spends her days sending little green patches and farmville requests. Booooo. Try engaging the human race a little more than what you bark at your local barrista. All these social networks are good for is one thing: to stalk eachother privately. New York is a swarm of strange people bumping and "Grinding" my sanity down to a smooth stone. Before you know it you're talking to yourself on the subway and stealing cabs from pregnant ladies. What I'm trying to say with all this is that your word should mean somthing sometimes. That's what I'm going to do and how I'm going to try and live and hopefully I will turn myself into the man I want to meet one day in the process.

I love you guys.