Tag Archives: Victory

Oh Doodles

I had a flurry of interest in cover-over tattoo web sites, specialists in transforming one bad symbol into, presumably, a less bad symbol. It underscores something about the tattoo that seems contrary to the intentions behind it. Not only do people change but so do the nature of symbols, which are never strictly personal in any case.

The body is in flux too, and the physical tattoo itself, fading, blurring. Which makes it all seem comic in a way; it’s already so hard to say what you mean, it seems that a tattoo is taken as an opportunity to control meaning by inscribing it on the one thing a person can claim to own for sure. Why doesn’t it work that way?

Also, can I request in my will to receive a full face tattoo after death? It wouldn’t hurt! And it’s a much more pleasant thought for an open casket funeral that down sad waxy “naturalistic”

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excavating tiny notebooks for tiny ideas

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In retrospect, boredom has always had its benefits, boredom at work, boredom in high school, boredom on saturday night, boredom in meetings, boredom in mom’s car, boredom in my car, boredom listening to bored people talk about things even they find boring. Boredom goes well with fear, fear of eye contact in particular, fear of anyone looking and seeing i’m afraid, or bored. At least fear can be exciting. Like you I filled the margins of books with my doodles, or expanded into making entire notebooks of word doodles, with really no substantive notes on whatever I was supposed to be paying attention to. Sometimes I run across these shrunken notebooks and my attempts to be amusing. This notebook was from an event in rwanda, which should be exciting, perhaps. But boredom has a way of making itself at home anywhere. And after all, Rwanda is just somebody else’s backyard, as common to them as your own dumpy surroundings. Eh?