Truck-less skate-decks are the avante-guard trimming around a room of wallpaper flash. Flaming skulls. Eyes of tigers. Hibiscus, and black tribal lines drawn up and down and everywhere.
Soldiers. Sailors. Mothers. Lovers. Hispanics from East LA. No matter which parlor in whatever hemisphere, the soul of ink is embodied in a heart pierced by an arrow.
It looks painful but it cries beauty.
An embroidered family portrait hangs on the wall. Joseph, Mary and child overlook the space like some ecclesiastical method of surveillance – a way of warding off nervous omens…perhaps providing an easing level of comfort to some, while simultaneously pissing others off– atheists mostly. But I’m a believer, or in some way an idol worshiper to say the least, so I dig it.
It smells like antiseptic and the stinging reverberation of an electric needle resonates in the melon between my ears, cascading from wall to wall, down the corridors and out the front door. It’s not a welcoming sound and yet packs of plaid and denim 20 and 30 somethings roam the halls and gather in the storefront like a nest of songbirds.
Women with the black lashes and fire-engine pouts of 50s pin-ups, and the men - skinny – like animated cells or colouring books from throat to sole. They gather and their familial like laughter blends into the rhythm of that buzzing electric sting. Ink-virgins often fear the foreboding anthem, but among these walls it sounds like home.
It feels like home and I like it.
The point of the needle pierces the skin on my arm and a sensation of heat vibrates above each shaven follicle. It isn’t pain, like many anticipate or recall. It’s an intense warmth and it provides almost a comfort – a comfort that I long for during those few moments when Joe lifts the pointed pen away from my skin in order to replenish its thirst for ink or progress to its new pigment. From dark to white. From true black to high lights.
When it’s over it leaves you overwhelmingly pleased and yet lingering. I wonder if that adrenaline, that rush… keeps on getting better, or if we will forever chase the high of our first time... My first time was merely just a tease. Left ever-wondering and wanting more.
They say, inductive reasoning (or inductive logic) suggests truths based on patterns of observation to arrive at answers of the unknown. What has happened or does happen predicts what will happen. As a strong advocate of inductive ways of thinking, I contrive a relationship between such reasoning to the conclusion that I may very well be a masochist. Recent needled events in addition to many self-reflexive artistic creations derived from the dark pains buried deep inside but boiling to the surface, may have proven so.
The paradox however, is that I get pleasure out of pain and joy.
I can’t provide a sufficient excuse on why I insist on self-description, but is there a word in which such a definition can be applied? Pleasure from pain and joy? “Human” perhaps? No… because when you consider such a definition in an alternate light – phrased by a different string of words, it’s technically suggesting pleasure prevails all the time. That isn’t human, is it?
That’s actually rather inhuman.
And alas, always left ever-wondering and wanting more.
Until next time bros,
Xo Lo
If I were inhuman I would be: a galaxy.
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