Work here is at a trickle right now, and the inspiration to plow through the writing I’m supposed to be doing is proving elusive, so I’m going to blow some digital Voguing to Danzig acreage on a subject that’s been gnawing on my cerebelum for the past few weeks: tattoos. Now, I don’t consider myself an especially conservative person. I’m cool with homosexuality, multiple piercings, and Manic-Panic’d hairdos – even if PDAs w/r/t the first make me uncomfortable (which isn’t really saying anything since hetero PDAs have the same effect), I ditched my earrings a decade ago, and the third causes me to shake my head in encroaching-geezerhood “kids!” bemusement. (You may not know/remember this, but once upon a long-ass time ago, in college, Tracey Renfro bleached my hair and helped me dye it green. Some SGA stooge subsequently informed me that I looked “like a stalk of celery,” which was only sorta funny then. Ah, youth.)
I enjoy Miami Ink as much as anybody, and support everyone’s unalienable right to get totally inked out by licensed professionals with sinister nicknames. But earlier, en route to the lunchroom to get some water, I passed a woman from a different department with a smudged, fading tat of something or other on her shoulder. It was so horrible and sloppy and amorphously meaningless and blotted to behold that I almost forgot where I was going. In response – and at no charge to the general public – I offer Voguing to Danzig’s official tattoo dictums, which are as follows. Voguing to Danzig admits to having zero tats and not being in any hurry to acquire some. So here goes:
1. Tattoos are pretty cool, in theory at least.
2. There’s nothing wrong with covering one’s body with tattoos, or clustering tattoos on the back, torso and/or apendages. Rock on!
3. Respect is due to you, should you choose to adorn your skin in such a fashion, because we have it on good authority that (a) getting tattoos really fucking hurts, and (b) tattoos that are visible no matter what you’re wearing can make getting a good job pretty difficult. Rugged!
4. Voguing to Danzig has no truck with you if you are a super-tattoo’d-up person who isn’t a Jackass star, biker, punk, metalhead, or other “tough customer” sub-demographic stat-whatever; Voguing to Danzig is, for the most part, above that sort of juvenile shit now. Voguing to Danzig doesn’t care if you’re a loquacious, animated tax attorney/DJ who blows off your friends for no apparent reason or Nelson Mandela or a frat guy or a high-powered accountant or maybe a high-school principal, though that would be pretty funny. Tat it forward, I say.
5. If you decide to get just one or two little tattoos, you must have them applied in a place where no-one can see them. You must do this because tats stranded in an ocean of un-inked skin look stupid, regardless of whether you’ve opted for a Chinese symbol that translates as “power,” Zippy the Pinhead, or a Bryan Adams lyric that doubles as your personal motto. On ankles, shoulders, and arms – especially on pale skin – these needle-jackhammered orphans seem so inexplicably stark and lonely that they register first as fakes and second as statements of dillentantism: they scream “Via a fifth of the Captain and a lot of peer-pressure, I found the courage to have a butterfly emblazoned on my forearm” or “Please recognize that I’m a subcultural dabbler/mid-life crisis victim and smirk at me.”
6. If you’re like most Americans, it’s likely that you’ll eventually gain a bunch of weight and generally let yourself go – at which point that “Black Flag prison bars logo” tat on your bicep will come to resemble the spot where somebody – I dunno, one of those people who routinely exclaim “Shut up!” when you say something surprising, then toss a friendly jab for some unknown reason – has punched you repeatedly for an hour. Which is to say, a severe bruise.
7. All of the above probably comes across as mean, vicious, and decidedly un-American (pretty harsh, what with tomorrow being Independence Day and all). After all, who the hell is Voguing to Danzig to tell anyone how to live his or her life? Voguing to Danzig, whose own career(s) is a joke due to a relative lack of ambition and awareness, who’s a frickin’ blogger of all things, who lives with his mom during the week in Maryland because he can’t find a job in Pennsylvania while his wife has to raise their son mostly on her own, who still gets acne, who’s never sat down for a tattoo himself. What right do I have to judge the great, semi-inked masses? Well, none really; I’m just someone who’s already outraged enough by the despoiling of our (great?) nation by environmental pollution, Hinder, and Dick Cheney that dragon tats on scrawny bone-white ankles and jailhouse tats on flabby brown arms really gets to me, you know, really pushes me to the edge like a forgotten Linkin Park hit single or some shit like that. Metaphorically, you understand: I’m not actually gonna go postal. Neck scarves and midriff-bearing tees on teen girls and woolen sweater robes (thank God that trend bit it), you know? It’s all just too much, a concerted-yet-indifferent assault on the eyes, and there’s no legit reason it has to be that way if people as a species take the time to actually think before acting, or, er, tatting.
So that’s it. Go to a barbeque tomorrow, or see Transformers – which I’ll be seeing next week, myself, with my cousin Kevin – or just sleep in, but please, for the love of Ron Burgandy, don’t get a set on musical notes inscribed on your wrist unless you’re gonna back that bad boy up with Antonio Vivaldi’s sheet music for the Four Seasons wrapping all the way up around your “temple.”
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