Grunk Gets Ink Done

What’s up, bro? I’m thrilled you’re open so late. It goes to show: you never know when a freak like me is going to crave some fresh ink in the wee hours of the morning. Kudos to you, Skaz, for knowing what appeals to your customers.

Up until an hour ago, I had no pressing urge to get a tattoo tonight. Then I found a couple blue-and-gold pills on the men’s room floor after a Tool concert. On the way home, riding the el-train, all these rad ideas for tatts shot into my brain, one after another—real vivid, like beams of color in a laser-light show.

I could taste vibes, too—good and bad, one flavored like butterscotch and the other battery acid.

Anyway, I turned to my old lady—say hi to Skaz, Tina—and told her we had to stop at Fullerton ‘cause I was going to explode if I didn’t soon feel the throbbing buzz of the needle on my back. She understood.

I jotted down some ideas in this notepad. I mostly use it to doodle in. Get a load of this one. Pretty erotic stuff, don’t you think? Darth Mal motor-boating Wonder Woman. What really makes me hard is that you can tell they’re in love. For awhile I wanted this scene to be my next tattoo. It seemed like the perfect imagery for my relationship with Tina. But then I broke up with her and started dating another chick named Tina. And Tina here really has more of a Batgirl figure, as you can see. So I had to scratch that idea.

But that hardly matters when I consider the thoughts for tatts I committed to paper on the train. With your help, Skaz, I’ll have one of the following sights carved into my flesh.

Okay. For starters, how about a zombie in a wheelchair? Don’t you see?! It makes a profound statement about the frailty of human flesh. Whether alive or undead, man is eternally vulnerable—his Achilles’ heel persists. When it is torn, the human can no longer run or jump, much less walk, just as the zombie can no longer stagger. Both will require a wheelchair.

We all know the threat of a zombie takeover is a real one, and since I’ve been stockpiling cans of tuna and honing my technique with a Samurai sword I bought at a pawn shop, I intend to survive it. But once the epic battle is settled and the wounded undead are left to crawl feebly across the land, I will show mercy on my monstrous foes by helping them into wheelchairs.

The main drawback, I guess, is that the zombie uprising has yet to happen. When it does, I don’t want to be viewed as a zombie sympathizer by my brothers at arms. Sure. Generations later, our enemies in World War II are now our allies, but it wouldn’t have been cool to get a tattoo of an American, a German, and a Jap working together to straighten out a swastika symbol before the war even started.

Forget about the zombie in a wheelchair, then. That’s the price I pay for being able to foresee the big picture.

Plan B is to get a tattoo of the Grim Reaper sitting on the toilet. What better way to negate mankind’s fear of our timeless predator than to depict him in such a compromising state? My senior thesis in Philosophy was titled “Everybody Poops, Everybody Dies.” In it, I offered proof that “everybody” includes the cause of death himself, the Grim Reaper, who therefore poops just like the rest of us and ergo should not be placed on a black pedestal as a symbol that instills fear in mankind.

But now it occurs to me that Tina shot this idea down mere moments before we walked into this place. She pointed out that the Grim Reaper is only a skeleton, that he lacks the digestive tract required to poop. Damn. I guess I forgot about that crucial detail amid all the excitement of entering your tatt parlor.

Tina put it as simply as “Skeletons don’t have guts.” Perhaps that’s what my professor meant to say when he called my paper “incomprehensible malarkey.”

It’s a shame I’m not getting a tattoo of the Grim Reaper sitting on the toilet on my back. Now I have to go on being afraid of death because it’s philosophically correct.

All right, let me get my head together. The third time’s a charm, maybe.

Only you only get to read that third charm if you get an eBook copy of More Stories, and Additional Stories. Sure, it's a hard life, oftentimes cruel, made almost unbearable by the cruelty of the elements coupled with the callousness of humans, and me being greedy by asking for three bucks, which you probably don't want to give me, compounds the plight of existence, but I will promise everyone who maintains but a morsel of sacred hope throughout such this catastrophic life on Earth this one redemptive proclamation... shit, I forgot my train of thought. Redemptive proclamation?! Jesus. Who says things like that...