July 2012 Archives

Nope, you're all right on.

No, and I'm not from Chicago either. However, I moved to Chicago sixteen years ago, fell in love with the city and felt like I'd found home after moving around my entire life. And then we went to New Orleans for vacation and then I felt like I'd found where my soul belonged. So it's sort of this difference between where everything fits and where everything feels free. After I wrote the cookbook I'd been trying to come up with a way to combine New Orleans and Chicago and food all in one thing. And I couldn't figure out how to do it. And then after I wrote the cast iron cookbook and we were on vacation in New Orleans and I saw the water meter and I was like, yeah, I really like that symbol, too. And I came back and talked to a friend and she's like, "just put that on a skillet." Why didn't I think of that? So I found a tattoo artist here named Serena Landers and contacted her and said these are the images that I'm thinking about combining, here's like twenty fleur-de-lis, here are several different Chicagoish images that I'm interested in, and a skillet. And so she came up with it. It wasn't at all what I had in my mind, but as soon as I saw how she combined it, it just made more sense than what I had pictured.

I've had it not quite a year and a half. And I'm sort of trying to figure out what else to put around it. I also do a lot of sewing, crafting stuff.

I've pictured it being the nucleus to my universe of tattoos.

Chicagoans are so enraptured by their city, it's great. Growing up in the city and eventually leaving for a semester for college I realized how much I loved the city, had to move back. So, eventually, I'd say about two-three years ago, I knew that it'd be the only city I would actually want to live in for the rest of my life. I was OK with that. I was actually really happy with that. Once I realized that, and at the time I was biking so much I wanted to incorporate the two and that's how this came about. And actually there are thirteen teeth on each cog, but that was because I like prime numbers, [laugh], so I altered it a little bit, but beyond that it was just to have a Chicago flag, and to have something that symbolized biking.

Lifelong. I grew up in the city, within the city bounds, mostly on the north to northwest side, along the Blue Line hallway. Originally Rogers Park, and then to Edgewater, down to Humbolt Park, Logan Square, eventually down to UIC when I went to UIC, and back to Logan Square. And so always been around there. 

I got it at Revolution, which is around Western, just south of Fullerton.

Hi, my name is Fuzzy Gerdes and this is my new blog. Might as well start out with a little blood, eh?

When I was a kid, we moved around fairly often for my dad's job; I think we averaged about 4 years in any one place. I moved to Chicago in 1999 and when I hit eleven years here, it was the longest I'd ever lived in one place. I love the city, I love the clean design of our flag, I love tattoos, and I also felt like I had accomplished a series of things that, like the meanings behind the Chicago Flag's stars, merited my own checklist (meeting and marrying my wife, producing an improv show that made the year's "best of" lists, going from the proverbial "couch" to finishing the Chicago Triathlon in two years, being awesome). A Chicago Flag tattoo seemed like a no-brainer.

Mine is a band that goes all the way around my left forearm, with the stars equally spaced all around. I narrowed the blue bands from their proper proportions simply because I didn't feel like I wanted thick blue bands there. I went to Tine at Speakeasy Tattoo in Wicker Parker (owned, nicely enough, by Patrick Cornolo who did the first tattoo I ever got in Chicago).