Tattoos (one more again) and Truth.

as an art teacher to young minds, I should make more of an effort to appreciate this crap; but I just can't, it displeases me even to soil my blog with it... but I digress

...In gym locker room; about to go take a shower... I ask the lady who is sitting on the bench in front of the only available stall if she is done with it. She answers yes and then asks about my tattoo. I tell her it is a rose and show it to her. She proudly shows me hers, a small butterfly on the side of her calf. I ask her when she got it. “Four years ago,” she responds proudly. I told her mine was thirty years old, and smiled at the thought of having a body organ, a part of which is older than that of a 76 year old woman... She told me about her 86 year old friend who also got new tattoos together with a bunch of body piercings. We then discussed the weather in New England...

...Was at the Barnes and Nobel, sitting on the floor in front of the philosophy shelf, trying to decide if I wanted to plunk a bunch of money on a book on Rorty and his critics... Behind me, reading a book from the New Age section of the store[1], sat what at the time I perceived to be a young boy whose age I would have put at maybe fourteen. We were both wearing Bermuda shorts. My legs old, freckled and bruised; his, smooth and young, imprinted with big Manga characters, together with letters of some language, real or invented, that I could not decipher, and taking up the whole of his calves’ skin real estate.

...I kept on reading. The boy left, only to come back later with an older girl/woman dressed in a Victorian-looking maroon dress with black lace and matching gloves. They kept talking about Nostradamus and werewolves. I remember thinking it creepy that such a young boy should be having deep conversations about such things with an older woman who did not appear to be his mother or sister. I then remembered that you had to be at least eighteen to get a tattoo. I took a closer look and noticed that “the boy” was actually a girl, and that she had car keys in her left pocket. The two girls did not seem like lovers, but friends who were getting to know each other through their shared interest in New Age...

...I kept reading Rorty’s theory on the relativity of truth. And yeah, I ended up plunking down a bunch of money for it...

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[1] ...that seems to be the section on vampires, werewolves, Nostradamus and who the fuck knows what else