Feedback No. 1

Speaking of messy graffiti, different tags layered over one another on walls, posters ripped up, redone, covered up, architectural additions and decrepit buildings, and their subsequent tearing down and reconstruction... all this makes me think of tattoos. I never bought into that "body as a temple" thing: it was more like my body as piece of trash thing. But I'm learning that trash can be quite beautiful. And perhaps we need to rethink the usage and meaning of the word trash.

In a hurry once, seemingly from out of nowhere, just some desire to do it, I decided on a pretty big tattoo directly above where the lowest part of my underwear would be, and right below my belly button: it's a deer skull, modeled after Georgia O'Keefe's famous painting of the deer skull, but it looks like some satanic version of it, especially because the antlers already form into these looping eyes at the top, but are made menacing by the dark ink and stark outline of the tattoo artist. I remember driving to the shop really late one night seven or so years ago, in a sort of hazy mess. The impetus or catalyst that led me to getting it was that I got stuck in some weird mental void where everything and anything reminded me of fucking, and I didn't get why or how to make those thoughts stop. That tattoo is one out of four I currently have.

During a checkup my doctor saw it and asked me, "That's new. Why did you get it?" I said, "I don't really know. I wanted to be reminded that there's something down there, you know, I wanted to be reminded that sex is an actual thing, not just something to do". She nodded as if she understood.

Detail of O'Keefe's Deers Skull with Pedernal

- F