Summer 1986

One stale and sweaty Saturday afternoon, 6-year-old me slunk around a noisy family gathering at my aunt Kathleen's crowded house in South Jersey looking for a place to hide. The adults screamed happily at each other in the 80s-brown kitchen, ignoring the flock of shrieking kids in the 80s-brown family room.

I hated loud parties as a kid, and I still do now. But I was a reasonably self-sufficient person, so I got busy poking around for quiet stuff to do or read by myself until it was time to leave.

In the 80s-brown back room, some distant uncle whose name I don't remember was watching baseball on a tube TV with his back to the wood-paneled wall, quietly sipping a sweaty red-and-white can of Bud Light in an equally-sweaty white tank.

I pulled myself up into an uncomfortable rocking chair to sneak a discreet look at the upper half of his exposed arm, which had this out-of-place mark on it that caught my eye. I didn't know what it was called at the time, but this was my first in-person look at a real tattoo - a military eagle whose once-black lines had melted into a blotchy, blown-out blue-green.

Stone cold. It was the sickest thing I'd ever seen in my short life.

As soon as I'm big, I'm getting that!

Winter 2022

This past Friday afternoon, I froze my shit off in a wrap-around-the-block line to get into the tattoo convention at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. I don't go to tattoo cons anymore - I stopped enjoying them about 15 years ago - but I made an exception this round because my tattooer friend Taylor Heald from Buffalo was in the house. We'd been plotting a piece together over email since 2020 but hadn't overlapped in the same city for years.

Taylor's in the top 5% most fascinating conversationalists I've ever met and also an incredibly kind, antiracist, and intelligent artist who I respect. For about 4 and a half hours, we shot the shit, caught up, and laughed (carefully) as he drilled a big yellow rose into the right side of my neck.

Yellow roses are traditional symbols of friendship, joy, and creative collaboration, and they remind me of two of my best people. Another friend being the one to design this piece with me and slap it in a conspicuous spot I can always see added another sunny layer of meaning.

Later that night, I burst in the front door at home beaming and crowing about my new prize to Jim before I even took my coat off. Throughout the evening, I repeatedly got up off the couch to check it out and grin at myself in the dining-room mirror.

Look at me. I'm the stone-cold one now. I look fucking awesome!

Here's a pic of my new fave; everybody say good job Taylor:

Somebody stop me

As far as non-humans are concerned, tattoos are the love of my life - no other interest that's consumed me at any point has endured as long and burned as bright.

I fell hard for them in 1986, got my first one as soon as I turned 18 (I'm 41 now), and have spent cumulative years of my life researching, planning, acquiring/traveling to acquire, and talking about them with other people online and in person.

Tattoos have helped me grow the confidence in myself to make literal hundreds of friends, start conversations, try bold new things like standup comedy, and get hired for good jobs!

I could very happily, very easily write an entire weekly newsletter just about subjects around tattoos. For this one, I had a bullet list with 13 ideas I wanted to mention but LOL, CONVERTKIT ATE MY FIRST COMPLETED SHOT AT THIS DRAFT, so I won't go into them right now.

Last week, I was writing a very ambitious edition of this newsletter about "fuck budgets" - as in, you only have so many fucks to give on any particular day, and your budget is a lot smaller than you think it is.

In a five-fingered slap of insulting irony, I gave so many fucks about it, and it got so long and complex, that I ran out of gas and couldn't finish it. It's fermenting in my drafts until I figure it out.

I'm trying not to overthink things this week. Let's keep it moving.

Euphoria, not the HBO Max one

I have an old friend who came out as a trans man in 2020 after a lifetime of aggressively not feeling at home in his own skin. An ongoing topic between us since then is gender euphoria, which is the opposite of gender dysphoria or body dysmorphia.

If you're interested to see more about the thrillingly uplifting idea of gender euphoria, check this out. I pulled the following bullet from there:

• Body Euphoria: An overall sense of comfort, ease, and enjoyment of the person’s body, including feeling “right sized,” in the right body, and free within this physical form

This is exactly where I'm at this week!

When I checked myself out in the mirror today after my Tegaderm bandage came off, I looked more like the Actual Me I see in my mind's eye than I did last week.

I look sick! This current body euphoria feels like a weapons-grade confetti cannon blasting gold glitter all the way to Buffalo.

You're gonna like the way you look - I guarantee it

All capitalism wants for you is for you to feel like shit constantly so that you'll buy stuff you don't need so you can feel better for a few minutes - so the enduring liberation, satisfaction, and peace that tattoos offer me feels like a cheat code.

They make me so happy! I like how I look almost all the time!

I believe in my bones the world would be a better place if more people could feel as content and at ease as I do every single day as a heavily-tattooed person.

I still have my days with the body dysmorphia familiar to almost everyone, but they're not only milder than they were when I was younger but pretty few and far between.

If you hate something about your body, at the top of my LUNGS I endorse that you go slap a sticker on that spot. As a female-presenting person in my 40s, as of last week I didn't like my aging neck - but I like it now! Problem solved!

This stupid life is crushingly short and you as a human being deeply, desperately deserve to feel good in your body. Enjoying what you see when you look in the mirror and relishing how you confidently move through your life removes painful barriers and opens a whole hallway of doors.

Plus, capitalism loses when you're satisfied with yourself! Those pricks don't get your money, you do! Hell yeah!

If you've been thinking seriously or semi-seriously about getting a tattoo, consider this your sign to go execute on that however you can - and as soon as possible.

Good luck - and I'll drop whatever I'm doing to talk to you about it if you need artist recommendations, advice, or any other help!

Albums I spun while I wrote this

• Original Son: Currents (2022)
• The Jukebox Romantics: Sleepwalk Me Home (2017)
• Against Me: New Wave (2007)
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