Cherry Street Coffee House asks me to make cartoons :)

The donuts (which I have been publishing on facebook because barely no one probably reads this blog) have become enough of a success to garner me some work on the side.

This is a real live political cartoon (thank Ben Franklin, cuz he drew that cut up snake, which was the first political cartoon ever published in America). Think about that. There's a cartoonist on the $100.

Anyhow. People with cell phones trip over dumb crap and then complain to the city about it. I should start complaining about how the crosswalk signals aren't perfectly timed for me to walk to work at a brisk pace.

FeCaesar and the Poopy Ace

FeCaesar and the Poopy Ace

Gregory Hofmann

Deuces, Aces, One-Eyed Faces are wild. The Suicide Jack is two wild, and the Poopy Ace is worth four. Ante up for some blackjack with a gang of cutthroat twelve-year-olds.

If you were dealt the Poopy Ace, you had five of a kind or an easy royal flush. If you didn't have it, the safe thing to do was fold every time.

I lost my Rickey Henderson rookie card and my brother lost a Playboy centerfold in the same hand to our neighbor Tim Whitman. Tim had six aces, but he was so terrified of his father discovering his naughty winnings that he took it home and immediately burned the centerfold in the Whitman family trash. It took some time for him to regain the trust of the Hofmann boys and return to the poker circle, and why did his family burn all that trash, anyhow?

I lost my lifetime collection of baseball cards to my older brother in one afternoon of loose cannon five card draw. Final hand of my young poker career, he spun the Poopy Ace in his fingers like Kingfellow the wizard twirling a dagger of fire. The edges of the card were soft and browned after years of use. The titular drawing on it had faded some, but even as I lost everything, I smiled at the simple comedy on that card. The Ace of Hearts. Turned upside down to form a bright red set of butt cheeks. Legs added below, and a torso added above. The pooping man is surprised that he's pooping, just as I am surprised to be losing the collection that I had spent my childhood accumulating.

The Poopy Ace is still at home. So is my baseball card collection, but it's not mine anymore. Real Hofmann family skeleton in the top right hand drawer of the old sewing machine. It's in a pack of cards bound by rubber bands to a 1985 edition of According to Hoyle. I learned how to play Cribbage from that book, but not Bridge or Euchre. My mother is always excited to reteach me the basics of Pinochle when I come home for a visit. And every time that we sit down at the kitchen table for a game of Gin Rummy, there's the Poopy Ace, robbed of its power because my mother says we can't gamble on Gin Rummy. We should just have a good laugh, a couple glasses of wine, and fill each other in on new thoughts, lingering concerns, and weigh her understanding of the world against mine. She wins that hand.

I'm not a gambler any more. I am a writer, and usually of fiction. As I fill pages with stories of socio-political drama, bad love gone good, non-violent violence, sci-fi travel memoirs and the architecture of religion, I have many bookmarks to hold my place. Among them, one is my mother, one is my brother, one is my other brother, and another is the Poopy Ace.

In my third book written within the fictional universe of No Surrender – working title: Epic – as the inanimate world comes alive at the atomic level and battles to maintain a balance between humankind and a living Earth, as a plague of zombies descends upon Rick Chicago and the Church of It-Doesn't-Matter Saints, and as Maggie Smith and her new boyfriends enjoy salads and coitus, a piece of poop on a mission comes up out of a toilet in Seattle, Washington. There's graffiti all over the walls – enough erotic testimonials about a man named Raymond that he almost takes the name for himself, but instead he calls himself FeCaesar the Imperialistic Roman Turd. He takes a wife and he leads his shitty people out of the sewers, out of the city and into the light, the fields, the mountains, the soils where their ancestors once laid themselves down to give their bodies back to the earth. It is not a journey easily made on account of modern sanitation and the gross factor, but he's got six dirty aces up his sleeve. He's a cultural challenger masquerading as a poop joke. He's got hope on his side because where I grew up, playing poker with Tim Whitman and my brothers, everything was wild. Total batshit crazy chaos. Go all in, because you just might win. You also might get the poopy end of the sticky.

Deuces, aces, one-eyed faces. The Suicide Jack is worth two. And the Poopy Ace will bring power to your people. True fucking story.

what wasn't good for pre-press is still decent non-fiction, even though the city said i couldn't grill grapefruit

February 3, 2010

Santa broke his fist off my face for Christmas. In the rum bloodbath I think I lost the hat I was wearing. It was the only Christmas present I had received after turning Jewish for a few weeks and then in the middle of Chanukkah turning back into nothing. I knew it was time to get started on some new shit.

I had to stop hanging out with me, get back to work. And then Jake gave me a killer photograph of a man with a flare in the night by the ferry terminal, and the story of a dear friend being deported and drowning in legal fees. Just write a story. Find the correlation. I fell back in to drinking. Burning the days away. I took a vacation that I could not afford and went to LA. Ell AY! Inside jokes. Most pleasant week in recent memory. No joking. Paradigm shift in my thinking: always envisioned LA as plastic/cement Mordor. I picked a prickly pear in Runyon Canyon, but I forgot to use the claw. Christine picked the prickly pear pricks from my hand. The sun was low. We sat and had the most delirious fruits of conversation. Maybe Mordor, if you go there with the right Orc, is a really nice place afterall.

Vacation can't last forever. Back to Seattle. Use the telephone. Build a grill, name it Rasta. Rename it Harmonica. Nice pose. Keep the inside jokes, dissect the vacation week, find every modicum of repose that made it so pleasant. Try to recreate it in Seattle like a science experiment. I fell back in to drinking, but not as deep. Burning the days away, and all-nighters with coconut oil skin, my drunk harmonica piercing the dark windows, echoing through the streets. I am not self-conscious.

Some good stuff happens and some bad stuff happens: I contribute a three-pronged performance to my friend Bryan's art show reading party to a hungry audience; I get pulled over by the cops because I failed to transfer the title for my truck into my name after the purchase and they discover that my license is expired. For legal and financial reasons, I am off the road. I am back on my bicycle, and my greasy Fish Fry shoes. I sing, I design, I grill, I write.

The chronology here is wobbly. Can only 100% determine which events are before LA, and which are after. Also 100% certainty: pre-scar and In the year of the Scar. Jake has really gotten this organized now. We have a meeting at his house. He and I, Gerardo, Miles and Mandy. Nice to meet everyone, pass around the talking stick, drink beer and tell stories. These are all good people. We work out the logistics of rallying around one common goal. Time to get cracking. Mandy is the only one not smoking cigarettes. She must be a health nut.

Have I started working on that story? The one based on the photograph and what's going on with immigration. Any progress?

Haven't put pen to paper, having difficulty finding suitable correlation. I have actually taken some notes, but the notebook is in my bag, which I forgot at the Canterbury the other night. But I want to get to work on a poster for the show. And ask if we can set up the grill on the night of the show. When's it going to be? March 14, last day of daylight-savings. Perfect! Does anyone make plans for the last day of daylight-savings way in advance? No, not really. Wonderful. Maybe we can burn a tiny effigy of a fish as it is the astrological wunderkind of March 14.

I have a few days off in a row. I put elbow grease and genuine Adderall enthusiasm into cleaning the apartment. This has not been attempted in months. I've got to get organized. Move the laptop from the bed to the desk to alleviate the constant pain in my neck from my attempts to type while horizontal. Move the desk chair over to the desk so that the desk can be used as a desk instead of an island for clean laundry to live on. Separate the big box of important shit into several smaller boxes of like items. Put a trash bag in the trash can. Bleach a whole bathtub of dirty dishes. Combine all the little bits of shampoo into one ultimate 10-in-1 shampoo. Change the dirty Internet sheets. I find the hat that I thought I lost in Oregon! Fuck you, Santa and Jesus! Real humans win again! I build a table out of an old bicycle, a board, some cardboard boxes and one of my paintings. It doesn't look trashy, but maybe I'm just high all the time. Now it's stacked with clean folded laundry. I don't like to have my clothing in drawers, because things get lost in drawers. Dressers, to me, are just tall tables with walls. When I find the expensive stylus to my Wacom tablet, I tie a string around it and fasten it to the tablet's cord. This defeats the idea behind having a wireless stylus, but it is a system that I cannot afford to live without, being a chronically absent minded thief and loser. I steal things from myself without noticing, then smuggle the items out into the world and lose them where no one will ever find them. When I get my bag back from the Canterbury the bartender asks me if it has any special markings. Well a couple of notebooks inside, and it's brown. Yeah, that's it in your hand. And HA! Yep. There's a pan lid attached to the strap! Hahaha! I laugh with the bartender, I go to 12th Avenue Iron to get the two major pieces of my grill welded to one another.

This is my closest encounter with deportation ever. I've met him, shared food with him. He is so generous. He is a better neighbor than me. Deportation. What do I know about it? When I was in England for a summer college program, a security guard at Sainsbury's grocery store threatened to deport me for attempting to shoplift three bottles of wine. He scared the crap out of me and let me go. I was a reformed man. This is a whole nother thing, though. He has been in America for about twenty something years. From what I had heard, and from how he carried himself at our first meeting, it is clearly my opinion that America is attempting to deport an American. That is the correlation in the photograph. Looking for justice in America by the light of an emergency flare.

Jake just met with a dude named AJ who is letting us set up shop for the event at the Cherry Street Coffee House around Pioneer Square somewhere. I was supposed to get up early and go with him this morning, but I lost my phone sometime in the revelry last night. Instead I wake up late with bad breath. I drink the second half of a 46 oz. can of V8. I worry about botulism. I listen to "I'm a man" by the Spencer Davis Group three or four times in a row. I am hooked. I dance. I worry about bedbugs. My scar hurts. My phone is hanging from the charging cord. That's where I lost it last night. That's where I hung it when I was drunk. That's ok. I'm writing.

I call Jake, I make myself a peanut butter sandwich, I take a poopy, I look around for cigarettes but I smoked them all last night (?), I look in my marijuana spot for marijuana and then I smoke marijuana. I'm doing it again. Burning away the days. Jake says that everything's clever with AJ, and jokes that I'm fired for sleeping through the appointment. He's gonna type up the notes from that meeting and send it to all of us as a pdf. I should go over there and hang out when the writing dries up.

I want to grill tonight. Have people over and make them the best hobo-grill food they ever ate. There must be a test night for the grill firing at full capacity before the show night. All of the artists involved have chosen a food item they wanted grilled. Jake wants Grilled Alfredo Cheese Sandwiches, Dilla says Banana and something else Cheese Sandwiches, Gerardo wants chorizo, and what did Miles say? Yep. Some of that sounds weird. But aren't we still hanging ten on the waves of the weird revolution? I'm gonna grill grapefruit.

I can only hope that they do not deport my new friend. I'm just getting to know the guy. Wait, no. I can do more than only hope. This show is gonna be sick and multifaceted. Jake's taking pictures, Miles is making movies, Mandilla's probably a genius, I don't know exactly what Gerardo has up his sleeve, but I know we all would like longer than a stressed-out month to get it all together. And we're all gonna donate a buck. Everyone's gonna donate a buck even though it could be spent to buy four lollipops or one cigarette from a stranger. I'm not made of money. Every dollar that I have a chance to earn is already spoken for by collections, parking services, and now this 550 dollar fucker that came bundled up with an invitation for a court date. Yet, I'm still hoping to sell a bunch of art and grilled cheese at this show and figure out what percentage I can donate to my new buddy's cause. Maybe I can get someone to donate bread and cheese. I've already got the pickles. Banana and Pickle Grilled Cheeses. That's what Mandy was on about.

Nowruz 1389

Aide Shoma Mobarak : Celebrating Nowruz with the IACA

by Gregory Hofmann

The nostalgia wasn't immediate when I walked ito Seattle Town Hall; the place was swanky, and people were dressed to the nines, and I was surrounded by more Persians than ever before. That's a pretty far cry from anything that ever happened in my little town back East. I hadn't been to a community event like this since the last time I was part of a community, back in Skowhegan, Maine in the late 80s and early 90s, and it wasn't like this; so I was glad that I didn't try to stroll in wearing my street clothes. Families were gathered to celebrate a holiday that I knew diddly-squat about. Nowruz. The first wave of nostalgia set in when I saw a little girl snapping photographs of the fancy holiday spread, and being gently scolded when she reached for an apple on the banquet table in the lobby. That apple, I found later, was to symbolize health and beauty going into the new year, and not to be eaten just yet. I didn't even know that it was New Year's Day. AJ Ghambari – our contact at the event – welcomed us quickly but warmly, pointed us toward the cream puff table, and disappeared into the auditorium. The lobby lights blinked, and we wandered inside. Showtime.

Here comes the nostalgia again, and it doesn't subside until later, when I leave the venue.

A high school aged duo performed traditional songs of Iran with the choral accompaniment of the Farsi speaking audience; my impression is that the two of them had been nervously anticipating this night for months, and possibly years as part of the audience. From up on stage, the audience must have seemed scary big, but an audience that sings along is a wonderful support group. After a brief welcome speech by representatives from the Iranian American Community Alliance (IACA), a gaggle of colorfully adorned kiddos poured out onto the stage in adorable misformation, bumping into one another, scanning the audience for the faces of their parents. Each child carried an offering for the traditional Haft Sin table up on the stage (here's where I learned the significance of the health and beauty apple from the lobby). It all happened too fast for me to accurately record each offering and its significance, but the performance was an endearing display of courage and solemnity by children too small to speak into the microphone. Love. The coming of Spring. Rebirth. Patience. Sunrise. Eventually the hard-smiling children scampered off stage, and were succeeded by an even smaller bunch whose dance instructors chaperoned them through choreography that seemed to blend modern with traditional. When all the children were finished, and had received roses for their performances, they were surprised by the sudden appearance of Amu Nowruz – the old man of Spring, and something like a Persian Santa Claus – who handed out something-I-don't-know-what to the eager young folks.

Intermission. Children chasing each other around a column in the lobby, a father carrying his sleeping daughter around like a sack of potatoes. Cream puffs and appetizers. A chance to talk to some of the people about what I now understand is going on. For some, the evening was an opportunity to celebrate with friends and members of the community, and to reflect upon the complexity of life in Iran. What a big crowd!

For me, it was an unexpected learning opportunity, and a chance to reflect through murky, rose-tinted memories on the community I left so many years ago in Skowhegan, Maine, where Nowruz isn't a blip on the radar, and where the entire town hall could fit inside the Seattle Town Hall's auditorium, but where dance and piano recitals held the same sleepy excitement that send ripples of supportive giggles through an audience of friends and neighbors.

The second half of the program involved more dance (just grown-ups this time), and a traditional string quintet. The sugar rush from the cream puffs had subsided, and my eyelids drooped. I would've fallen asleep entirely had I not been so tickled by the memory of falling asleep in the stiff chairs of Skowhegan's Town Hall, and being slung over my father's shoulder like a well-dressed sack of potatoes. There was talk of a dance party following the performance, but I didn't stick around to find out. It had been a long day for me, and I was off to bed early.

The event was a wonderful introduction to the the IACA, and a cozy reminder that in all the communities in the US and around the world, each generation hopes for peace and prosperity in their time and for generations to come So, aide shoma mobarak, and here's hoping that Amu Nowruz brings harmony, and the apples of health and beauty to the people of the IACA, Seattle, Iran, and the World in this, the year 1389.

Donut fill up my inbox

Next Show - SEATTLE IMPRESSIONS - March 14

Tell your friends. I hope everyone can make it :) This is gonna be tons of funs.