Six Inches Deep in Mud

Jacob Tierney, we need to have a little talk about how you gave Scott and Kip sunlight and GAVE SHANE AND ILYA MOONLIGHT.

instead, all her brainspace spent on that song would be replaced with the vivid memories of roman gladiator, taylaurius velox. she's able to hide this at first, but her music begins to take on a gradually romaner and romaner tint. at first, people are like "damn, she's getting REALLY conservative, huh" and other people are like "wow, she's so deep, she knows what a rubicon is" but eventually travis kelce leaves her out of nowhere (he wasn't sure if dating someone possessed by a roman gladiator made him gay or not and anyway he was getting sick of being like "we're going to play the lions" and taylor being like "LIONS? WHERE?") and taylor publishes an entire brutus themed album about this betrayal and it's beginning to weird people out

and so eventually travis kelce is getting like, bomb threats sent to his family for leaving taylor and eventually he's like "okay, okay, i left her because she kept having all these vivid nightmares of gladatorial combat and she kept saying that football was giving her the ick because we never actually killed anybody for the glory of rome" and then he just gets more bomb threats because he left a struggling woman during a mental health crisis

and eventually taylor is writing music about her forbidden roman senator lover and her fanbase is either whittled WAY down or WAY up because people want to watch this trainwreck happen (or maybe she influences culture so hard that we're just all really into rome now) but she's being super cagey about the name of this roman senator. until. and now here's the twist:

weird al has been getting all of the same vivid memories of taylaurius velox. and he still has all his memories of her old songs. so he's writing all these detailed song parodies of taylor swift songs that don't exist anymore including specific details about their shared gladiatorial reality that taylor has never shared with anybody else. including that her lover's name was publius, and she's been calling him Poob for short

at this point a lot of original swifties are leaving. they could do the brutus stuff, but they really can't survive poob. taylor makes a clapping back at the haters song including the lyric "these bitches don't know publius" and it ends up all over all sorts of merch. there's a renewed archaeological interest in roman gladatorial combat

most importantly, the internet discourse is the best it's ever been. does this make taylor swift transmasc? is travis kelce problematic for leaving his fiancee while she gradually morphs into a roman gladiator? is this good queer representation? if taylaurius velox was a gay man, does that mean the gaylors were technically correct? is weird al morally wrong for capitalizing off of her music if she cant remember it anymore? was weird al sent by god to torment taylor swift?

What he could not seem to comprehend is that we could not grow our business, at least not without significant time and monetary investment. Cows take two years from pregnancy to the size that you can sell. If we buy adult cows, our margins become razor thin or even negative. Even if we somehow could acquire some cows, our barn and hay fields are already near maximum capacity. Renting another field would be relatively easy, building a bigger barn not so much.

Cows are living animals, they aren't widgets that can be produced infinitely. Besides that, many businesses inherently cannot grow, because if they do they'll become something else. The delicious bakery down the street cannot produce much more than they do, if they began mass marketing and production they'd eventually be selling the equivalent of Twinkies. We grow grass-fed, organic beef, if we expanded how long would that last? Eventually we'd become the very factor farms that we hate. Some things can only ever be made on a small scale and they are usually the best things.

I'm plenty efficient, at getting things done the way i intend to.

i described to my econ-brain-rotten brother how i run my tattooing business and got the same responses as above.

It's like he absolutely didn't hear me when i explained the nuanced reasons i even started doing this work; I started tattooing because i was tired of the isolation of my (at that point) decade-long career in the animation industry. I was sick of my best work rotting on hard drives in shut down studios, of never getting to see anyone interacting with my art.

Moved to a big queer city, where my community got me started: queer tattooers patiently shared information and resources with me. early on, friends volunteered to let me experiment on their skin. Then they started offering to pay for materials, then more. Then they brought their friends to me...

I have a beautiful community of people who know me from the drag scene, from the poetry and writing scene, from the techno scene - and all these ppl come to me because they know me, met me, trust me, because they felt comfortable in my presence.

I only have like 1200 followers on my tattooing Instagram - which rly isn't a lot for a tattooer. But i stay busier than some ppl who have more followers - and im pretty sure that it's because 90% of the ppl following me have actually met me irl. I don't give out my info to just anyone. I have to have a nice interaction with them - and they with me - and i basically invite them to get to know my work, if i think they'd be interested, if they seemed excited about it.

I built my business out of love and care, and connection. I built it because i wanted more of these things in my life. I am making what i wanna see in the world.

Im deeply proud of what I've accomplished as a tattooer, exactly because i stuck to my own beliefs and built a business that is fully customized to me, what im excited about, my abiliy and disability levels, and my philosophical values. This part of my life is all mine, crafted and chiselled just how i want it.

I don't like getting up in the morning, so my sessions never start earlier than 1300. I have a hard time focusing alone + i wanna empower ppl who aren't artists to play with art + help ppl practice and engage their decision making and request making skills - so i design the tattoos with them sitting right next to me, being part of the art process. I don't like doing math and counting so i give my clients a sliding scale based on project complexity, and they get to choose how much they pay me. This also doubles as a way to give ppl more agency in the process of getting a tattoo. Etc etc it goes on and on - every aspect of the process is considered and phislophically and emotionally calibrated. I love what I've created and i love giving the gift of a well-crafted thing......

And after hearing me explain all that, my brother said my marketing wasn't efficient and my business isn't scalable...

Go a little fart

Dig a little dee

Reach a little

Catch the Cat