think before you ink

amazing what a run to the grocery store will do for you in the small town where you grew up…

…in the simplest of terms, tattoos are permanent – so think before you ink!

while making the run for cheese (the one thing buffi WOULD eat, but not so much anymore, and now the other dogs aren’t eating either, which may be a bad sign or a sympathy thing – time will tell) i saw more than several bad tattoos on people i grew up with. anywhere from just KINDA bad to downright shitty. some of these people avoided my glance, probably out of spite. you see, my high school class had it’s 20th reunion last year, and quite a few people added me to facebook. i accepted all the adds, ’cause i didn’t want to piss anybody off and i figured, “what’s the harm?”

then i discovered the harm.

you see, more than a few of my former classmates would post pics of their tattoos, and typically they looked six steps BELOW prison ink. like shittier than some nineties-era garage shit i’ve seen. and they couldn’t just post the pic – they had to put “TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK?!?!” as the captions (typically in all caps – that’s wasn’t a mistake on my end)

well, as mom always said – if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything.

the problem was i KNEW one day i’d be on facebook, drunk, and see one of those “new ink” pics and give my REAL opinion.

most of these people still live in town…that could result in anything from egg on some windows to a torched house full of the doggies. they seem to have enough problems of their own lately – no need for daddy’s mouth to make things worse, right? so, i deleted them all off of facebook – just to avoid the social awkwardness of dogging on their shitty ink and getting slammed for criticizing a bad choice they made that, unlike their kids or their weight, would actually plague them for the rest of their lives no matter where they ran…

(this sounds shitty but isn’t – run FAR enough and your kids can’t find you, run FAST enough and you lose the weight – but shitty tattoos will STILL be there unless you run through an expensive laser clinic multiple times and let’s face it…if they had money to burn, they would have gone to a good tattoo place and gotten a decent job done in the first place, right?)

maybe not…

(a whore first – me commenting on a comment that was in parentheses – which is done during editing, IN the actual article…as they say in modern hip-hop vernacular, “REMIX!!!”)

when i was a wee lad (okay, eighteen or nineteen) i used to work in a club with a rap music side and i’d see all these older guys show up in swap meet track suits with “NK AIR” on them all over and a check mark (versus the nike swoosh) embroidered on them. see, nike can patent the swoosh, and the word “nike”, but as “air” is one of the elements of the planet not even THEY were big enough to patent THAT word…so it could be on bootleg gear. at the time i thought, “poor bastard – can’t afford the real shit…”. but now i see it differently – maybe he couldn’t TELL the difference. to some people, i suppose, there really IS no difference between shitty product and pricey product, save for the price tag…and if there eyes can’t see the difference, than a $20 tattoo in their buddy’s garage is just as good at a $150 dollar REAL tattoo at a REAL tattoo shop, right?

as grandma kay used to say, “if they don’t know the difference, what difference does it make?”

so, rock on with your shittily-arted-up selves…just realize i deleted you off my facebook for your OWN protection and stop the death stares.

“you’re welcome”

there – i covered my end here.