Tag Archives: zen

The Things We Spew While Getting Tattooed

I don’t know about you, but whenever I go in for a tattoo session that lasts more than an hour, at about an hour or two in I start babbling incessantly, a slurry of words spewing out of my mouth like vomit after too many chugs of whiskey.

Take yesterday, for example.

Me: Wow, your hands are all stained with red, blue and yellow ink. Looks creepy, like some type of toxic stain or ooze from an infected nuclear plant.

Tattoo artist: Or like M&M’s.

Me: It does look like M&M’s! You know those old commercials about M&M’s melting in your mouth but not in your hands? Lies. All lies.

Tattoo artist: They melt in your pockets, too.

Me: They melt everywhere.

Tattoo artist (pauses): Everywhere?

Me: Ur…

Which leads me to a confession.  Read more

The Zen of Being Tattooed

There’s an art to receiving a tattoo. People who get tattoos generally cope with the pain aspect in different ways. Some clench their teeth or pop pills. I saw a chick once lounging on her stomach and reading a book as the tattoo artist drilled into her calf with his needles. For all I knew she could have been on a beach in Madrid.

One of my tattoos was laid down on some touchy real estate, traveling from stomach to ribs, up my back and over the collarbone. It consists of four red-winged blackbirds – more for their beauty and the fact that I light up every time a see one than for any mythical reason. I’m all about aesthetics.

According to Vintage Tattoos: The Book of Old-School Skin Art, tattooing has been around for quite some time, the first evidence appearing around 10,000 B.C.  Otzi the Iceman, frozen since 3,300 B.C in an Alpine glacier, had 57 tattoos which consisted of lines and dots. Circuses, fairgrounds and sailors helped spread the popularity in the West throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Advances in tattoo equipment over the years have helped more and more people decide to join in on the fun of being human art frames. Today it seems that almost everyone I know has one.

My first tattoo (fortunately or unfortunately, who knows) was made with Indian ink on my right ankle when I was a fifteen-year-old vagabond. I had appropriated the ink from an art store and was sitting on the curb in Boulder, Colorado poking it into my skin using a sewing needle and thread, when my friend’s older brother walked by and said, “You’re not doing it right.” He proceeded to poke my skin harder and faster with the needle until an eye and the nickname Cat were there for time and temporal eternity.

On the most recent tattoo, the tattoo artist started the outline of the four birds first. As he was doing the first bird, right above my left hip bone on my stomach, I could not wait for him to finish.

“The next bird won’t hurt so much,” I told myself.

When he got to the second bird, I couldn’t wait for him to get to the third bird.

“The third bird will hurt less than the one here on my ribs,” I surmised.

But the third bird hurt worse than the second. And the fourth, final bird was the most excruciating.

Often in life, I can’t wait for this thing to be done and over with so that the next thing can go ahead and happen, only to find that the next thing doesn’t live up to my expectations, or that I didn’t enjoy the first thing when I had the chance.

Had I known that each bird would increase in ouch factor, I wouldn’t have wished for a better moment in the future than the one I was currently having.

During the second tattoo session, as the artist was filling in the color on the first two birds, I worked hard on breathing. In and out; focused and slow. I imagined I was weightlifting and needed the breathing in order to heft a heavy steel ball over my head.

“You can handle it,” I told myself often.

I felt the pain as it was happening – reminding myself that the next bird had no guarantee of feeling any less painful than the current bird.

And it worked.

I felt everything in the moment, not focusing instead on something better in the future outside of the moment. Soon my body, realizing there was nowhere else my mind would let it go, kicked out some heavy opiate-like endorphins.

Accepting the pain and moving through it made being tattooed a strangely peaceful experience, a reality I imagine many others have already discovered. Towards the end of the session, some of my favorite music came on the radio a bit unexpectedly and I paid attention to the music, along with the sensation of needle on flesh. Every time the needle seemed to dig into a particularly sensitive bit of flesh over my ribs I thought of the end result and the reasons I was having this living art project etched on me to begin with.

Being in the moment, paying attention to my breath, not wanting anything to change and accepting what was ultimately taught me the zen of being tattooed, bird by bird.

To Wax Zen and Such.

We strive so much in this society, but for what? To fill the empty ample hours of endless space in which we might just find ourselves if we stopped for long enough?

We’re all fighting our own ghosts of the present and the past. The previous incarnations of ourselves from the many parallel universes we inhabit are sometimes riding alongside our tornado-torn houses singing, “I’ll get you my pretty and your little dog too.”

But life isn’t really about feeling good all the time. As humans we want to feel good. Our bodies want sugar/alcohol because it’s the quickest form of sustenance it can get. From an evolutionary standpoint our bodies are just being super efficient at their own long-term expense. I don’t think the body cares much for the future. All it knows is now. And now it is hungry. So eat that snickers, right?

But our minds are planning and scheming up ways to separate themselves from our bodies. The mind would be happy if it could float around like Max Headroom just taking up space without worrying about the sleep and the hunger and all that stuff (never mind that the mind needs sugar just as much as any other body part).

My point being that our bodies may want to feel good, and our minds may want to feel good, but that’s not what life is going to give us all the time. For some reason, it’s just not possible to feel good every hour of every day. To wax zen on you a bit, I’d say that we need the bitter so that we can appreciate the sweet. This world is full of sickness and hunger and pain and fear and violence. At the same time there is love and beauty and satisfaction and happiness.

Life is some kind of amalgamation of the juxtaposition between happiness and pain. Somehow, we have to let go of both to appreciate either.

Otherwise we’re just hungry ghosts running around wishing for more. It’s not enough for a hungry ghost to eat this pizza right now. It wants ice cream. And before the next bite it wants another bite. And before that bite is done it’s worrying about how to procure the next bite.

The answer is to experience life for what it is. Experience wanting that next bite. How it feels to grasp and need. How it feels to let go of the grasping and the needing. To settle into the unknown. Let the want be the want without forcing it to become something else.

Or something like that.

I don’t know where I’ll be a month from now. Could be I lose my car and this house and end up in a studio apartment with a bicycle to take me where I need to go. Could be I play an open mic and meet a bunch of cool people I want to jam with and spend all my time writing music. Could be I just carry on wondering what to do next.

The novelty of it all is this cliff’s edge I’m hanging onto. The uncertainty of it all. We can always look back and say, oh, that makes sense now that it’s over. I had just the right job or friends or amount of money to learn what I needed to learn. But while we’re going through it we’re grasping for something else, unless we stop to feel, literally, everything this moment has to offer.

There is no guarantee we will ever have another moment to sing, write, exercise, work, be amused or embarrassed. Nothing is set in stone. Yet we operate under the presumption that we’re guaranteed another sunrise or rainstorm. Hell, you could be living in a leper colony in Nepal, shunned by your town and community because of fear and disfigurement.

Sometimes the things I take for granted are abundant. Two legs. Healthy lungs. A soft bed to sleep in. A working shower. A car that runs. A husband. Some food. Family. Freedom of choice.

Instead of counting what’s missing, let’s count what’s here. What we already have. Because you can have goals to change what you have and strive for more, but you never have anything other than what you have in this moment, right here.