what else? tattoos again

I know I’ve waxed "poetic" about tattoos tw ice already on these “pages”. This time: again tattoos, but no more poetry. I’m sick and tired of looking at way too many, what looks like, green ink smudges on people: ugly people, pretty people, little people, tall people, big ol’ fat fucking people. When something becomes this ubiquitous it starts losing any and all meaning.

Although it received an average of only a 2 to 3 star rating on internet reviews, I thought John Irving’s Until I Find You was a beautiful book using the obliteration of a person through tattooing as the centerpiece of its narrative. Yeah, the end, as with most of his novels, is indeed weak; but one does not read John Irving for his endings. The book was art and imbued each tattoo etched on the skin of one of the central figures with meaning. What I see out there is just a lot of ugly crap.

That’s what bugs me the most; the undifferentiated horror vacui of it all. The complete lack of breathing space; and when there is space, the complete disregard for composition, placement, or beauty. The whole thing is starting to offend me from an aesthetic, as well as, from a symbolic point of view. I am feeling claustrophobic, drowning in sea of "green" ink on flesh, with none of it looking any different from the rest. It’s just too easy to get tattoos these days; and obviously too easy to become a tattoo “arteest”.

I wonder if in the future (assuming there is such an animal) some archeologist, excavating the earth looking for signs of early 21^st century Homo (certainly not) Sapiens Westernensis, won't find us by searching for heavy metals in the soil where our bodies were buried. At least all this ugly crap will have a purpose, if only as subject matter for some kid's PHD thesis on soil analysis.