The Muting of Internal Racket

In the cinema the other day, I found that I was still thinking about my projects for the first half-hour of the action.

This is unusual. I normally find that sitting in the darkness with nothing but the film in front of me is a surefire way to mute the internal racket.

So today, drastic action clearly required, I sit down with notebook and pencil.

I empty my thoughts onto the verso and then form a mid-term plan on the recto. I then smash said plan into reasonable, doable tasks for ToDoist to gobble up and for me to forget about.

And now I know where I stand. It’s like a reset button.

This seems to be something I just have to do once every few months. I think it’s because, when all’s said and done, I’m actually a bit thick and need to think things through very carefully if I’m to understand them on a level visceral enough to do any good.

Whatever the reason, I now feel like I’ve been through whatever the opposite of a threshing machine is.

And now… back to the hard drinking.

Peninsula

To Cove Park, an artist-run centre on the rural west coast. We reach it by train and by ferry.

We’re the ferry’s only passengers and the boatmen have to extend the ramp just for us. We’re a minute late and the boatmen have already begun to unmoor. This makes them us hate us a bit, presumably because they’re now no longer able to take off their trousers for the return journey (or whatever it is they like to do when they have an empty).

It’s temping to keep saying things like “yo-ho-me-hearties” to annoy them even more but I manage to restrain myself. I think I’d have ended up being quietly plopped over the side and into the Firth, my final thought being oh look, a plastic fork.

At Cove Park, we rendezvous with Alan who shows us the grass-roofed pods and shipping container residencies, and then off we go for a day of the sillies around the peninsula.

We drop into Helensburgh, visit Ross at his house (where we eat soup with an original Soup Dragon), and drive past Faslane where Alan forbids me from bouncing pennies off The Bomb.

Finally, we head to Hill House to marvel at “the box,” the impressive cage now surrounding the house to help thwart its ongoing fall to rising damp. The official website has a quote from the President of the NT who says the house is “dissolving like an aspirin in a glass of water.” You’ve got to give him points for, well, not poetry exactly, but at least for not putting on the middle-manager claptrap voice when he stepped up to the mic that day.

In said box, we walk up and along some catwalks around the outside of the house. I don’t quite make it to the highest point, which would have afforded me a view over the rooftop, because when I make the mistake of looking down through the steel-mesh gantry, my stomach uncharacteristically tries to escape my body.

Still, I now have a good idea of what a Mackintosh Masterpiece looks like when it’s spinning, which is a nice thing to strike from my bucket list.

Home again only to lose another raisin.

Raisins

Yesterday, I took some raisins from the jar in our kitchen. A single raisin fell to floor and, impossibly, has yet to be found.

The same thing happens again this morning. If this continues, we’ll be ankle-deep in raisins and we won’t be able to see any of them.

Poontang

I spend too much of the day following news of the Benn Bill, the most powerful weapon at the moment in the arsenal against you-know-what.

Rolling news always leaves me feeling slightly demented and incapable of doing anything like work, so I cut my losses and go to the cinema for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood:

Pussycat: Obviously, I’m not too young to fuck you. But obviously, you are too old to fuck me.

Cliff Booth: What I’m too old to do is go to jail for poontang. Prison’s trying to get me all my life, they ain’t got me yet. The day it does, it won’t be because of you. No offence.

I mean who talks like that? Poontang. No offence. I sort of love it.

When I return to the news, Caroline Lucas has lambasted Jacob Rees Mogg for lying around on the benches like a Lothario. She never misses a chance to fight evil and she really shows him up. I hope one day to see her drag him by the ear out of the House where the protesters can tear him limb from limb. Actually, that might be the Tarantino talking.

How I Archive My Paperwork

The new Idler magazine is handed to me by Hanson, dutiful postie to our Scottish Belle Ombre.

Hanson’s excited because the chap from Sleaford Mods is on the cover and gurning at us through the cellophane.

Tearing off the wrapper, I turn first, as is human and natural, to my column. It’s probably my worst one yet. It’s all about how I archive my paperwork.

I don’t recall what hurry there was on the day I wrote the piece or in what flavour of spiritual funk I found myself, but in terms of ideas I was clearly running on vapours. I must remember that the column is one of my most consistent and important outputs and I resolve to do better.

Still, there are two lines I’m quietly pleased with:

The idler prevails by putting her feet up and leaving them there.

And, to describe the joy of throwing things away, I describe my paperwork as:

snuggled down warmly in the landfill.

Maybe I’m being paranoid, but these conjoined minuscule moments are probably why I didn’t get fired or spiked.

As it happens, today is filing day for the December issue and I’ve been asked to write about winter clothes. I do have a way to tie this to the column’s “escape” paradigm and I have already sprinkled it with what are hopefully some enjoyable and unpredictable turns of phrase, but I’m still left thinking of Will Self’s term for this sort of thing: “the new glib.”

As I say, I must do better, even if it means defying the idler’s credo of trying harder. And I will!I will!

Some Innocent Blowhole

I go for a lot of walks and, as I do so, I feel a near-constant urge to pick up litter.

I’ve considered buying some gloves and bin bags for just this purpose: so that my walks might be more useful than mere exercises in burning calories, collecting steps, and providing an admittedly-important space for thought.

And yet I resist. As compelling and reasonable as the urge to pick up litter might be, I don’t want to become an unpaid a litter picker. I’m already a barely-paid (but integrity-rich) writer and a (very, very) poor man’s David Sedaris. There’s a point of justice here too: the council should divert funds away from middle management and into picking up litter faster than people can drop it and, of course, people shouldn’t be dropping it in the first place.

So I’ve decided to impose a little rule about picking up some litter: I will pick up plastic take-away forks. Goodness knows there’s enough of them around and they’re often overlooked by the council’s “pro” litter-pickers on account of their being small. That way, I can increase the utility value of my walks without becoming obsessive about it or feeling like a volunteer patsy.

I have a thought about small pieces of plastic litter that go unpicked: they probably end up in the ocean and jammed into some innocent blowhole, don’t they? I mean, Glasgow’s not a coastal town, but these plastic forks and bottle caps and the likes are probably rained along the gutters, washed into the Clyde, swept into the Firth, and onward into the sea. It hardly takes geological time for Senga McWeegie’s absent-minded take-away forkdrop to end up juddering like a schoolboy’s ruler from some sinless Caribbean swim bladder.

So that’s what I’ve started to do. On my walks, I pick up forks and I put them in the bin, working on the assumption that they’ll soon be snuggled down warmly in the landfill (yes, this is a time-travelling hyperlink to the age of the Morlocks) where they can’t be any more trouble. Join me! Pick up some forks! Stoop, I dare you, for the Oceans!

The Doggos

I’ve never been overly fond of dogs but my wife loves them and her enthusiasm is clearly rubbing off on me.

Whenever we see a dog being walked, or sitting in a car, or waiting patiently outside a shop, or miles and miles away from us in the distance, or in a painting, or in a Where’s Wally? book, or in a dream she’s had, my wife says “a doggo!” and I say, “yes, marvellous,” and then life is allowed to continue until the next canine friend comes along.

But now, when I see a dog on my own, my association is no longer of Cujo chewing through the side of that Ford Pinto, but of my happy wife’s glee at their species’ simple existence.

Today, I saw a Golden Retriever on the train home from the wedding and he was being so good that I’m fairly certain the pupils of my eyes turned into love hearts.

The dog was clearly troubled by the motion of the train, but because his man wasn’t scared, the dog followed his lead and retained his cool.

He was such a good boy (a “twelve out of ten good boy,” as I’ve learned to describe it) that I felt in my bones that he should be given a loving pat-pat on the head and also, if at all possible, a biscuit.

That’s proper dog fondness isn’t it? I like dogs! I think to myself. Hooray! I like dogs at last! I’m normal!

Samara looks on with joy in her heart.

Hurrying to our connection at Crewe station, I hear a furious yapping and growling from some dogs around the corner. We soon see that the yappers are a pair of lint-coloured, crooked-fanged gremlins being carted around in a pushchair. They’re going berserk because they’ve spotted another dog from across the concourse.

In what is clearly a test, Samara asks if I still love doggos.

I pick up an imaginary telephone, calmly dial an invisible number, and say coolly, “gas them.”

So am I back to Square One now? Or is it simply that some dogs are 12/10 good boys while others are throttlable bastards?

The Wedding Cake

Today is my sister’s wedding and, in the afternoon, Samara and I find ourselves alone in a room with the wedding cake.

It’s a beautiful, three-tier lemon cake and, so far as I know, none of the other guests has even seen it yet.

The excitement is too much for me and I decide that I want to touch the cake with my finger. Must touch the cake with my finger.

So what? I just want to be able to reminisce about touching the cake with my finger while nobody’s looking. I’m making memories.

“I’m going to poke it,” I say aloud, advancing upon the cake as if under the control of a hypnotist.

“Please don’t do that,” says Samara, but I pretend I haven’t heard her and I continue in my zombie march, my Judderman shadow cast upon said confection, eyes wide and finger extended like a malevolent Aye-Aye.

And I touch the cake with the tip of my finger.

What happens next is a bit of a blur, what with all the screaming devils in my head and all, but who’d have thought a wedding cake would be so soft?

My finger leaves a dimple in the icing.

It’s only slight. A minor imperfection. It’s not like I rammed my whole hand into it.

“Look what you did!” says Samara.

“Fuck,” I say.

The thought flickers across my mind that maybe I can correct it but, fearing a Father Ted-style “tapping out the dent in the car” situation–I throw the thought aside as most people would throw aside the thought of poking an unattended wedding cake, and decide instead to run away quite quickly.

If anyone should ask if I saw who touched the cake, I’ll pretend I’ve never even heard of cake. What is cake?

But, just as I turn on my heels, I find myself eye-to-eye with… some guy. A bloody witness!

A man with wire-rimmed glasses and a soul patch has come in and is staring at me. He’s seen the whole thing.

I consider pulling his trousers off in one sudden tug, but my wife is clearly already appalled enough by my behaviour for one wedding so we just walk past him sheepishly. It takes about an hour.

But whoever that guy was, he’ll always know that the bride’s brother at that wedding in 2019 poked the cake.

If he’s anything like me, the secret will nourish him for years to come. He’ll remember it at random moments–standing in line at the cinema, renting a lilo, repairing a shoe–and he’ll laugh. And people will look at him like he’s mad and this will make him laugh even more.

Or maybe–just maybe–he’s a TELL-TALE TIT.

Finding him and killing him is the only option now isn’t it?

Oh, why did I have to poke that wedding cake? I don’t even know anymore. But I think we can all agree that it was Samara’s fault. Imagine being in her position and not rugby tackling me to the ground. Honestly, you can’t take her anywhere.

The Wretched

On an England-bound train to attend my sister’s wedding, fields of harvested wheat zip by and a young business consultant sits at a table across the aisle.

She has a tattoo of a pineapple on her inner arm, one of a flamingo on her calf muscle, and a large bottle of Birra Moretti–opened but completely untouched–to the side of her laptop.

She’s beavering away at said laptop, or at least was beavering before collapsing suddenly into her own folded arms in the classic stance of white-collar despair.

On her screen is the source of her misery: a SWOT analysis for a gastropub.

Now, it’s not nice to make fun of the baffled or to withhold help from those who won’t help themselves, but bloody hell girl, the answer’s right in front of you! Drink the beer!

First Rule

All of the low-use fabric items in our home (bed linens, winter clothes) are neatly stacked and stored in vacuum-sealed bags, which always amuses any friends who happen to notice. They think I’m an anal-retentive madman.

While I’d be lying if I said the zip-locked order doesn’t appeal to that side of me, it’s really only a measure to thwart our pesky, gourmand house moths. The first rule of pest control, before you get onto exotic poisons and psychic warfare, is to remove their food supplies.

Or maybe the “first rule of pest control” is that we don’t talk about pest control. In which case my frequent blogging of the experience will probably see me barred from the clubhouse. I’ll have to hand in my insecticide-laden badge and moth-hunting gun, a teeny-tiny blunderbuss.

But maybe the first rule of pest control is actually more like a Hippocratic oath: “first do no harm by actively breeding pests, especially radioactive super-pests that will swallow the world.”

That one. I believe in that one.

The Millionth Me

No more! Please, no more!

Alan came over this evening to take some pictures, one of which will become the author photograph for a new book jacket. This meant another session of looking at my own dopey face on a screen for longer than is strictly healthy.

While it doesn’t have to be perfect, I don’t want to look at the book jacket on publication day only to see an entire asparagus hanging from a gap in my teeth or a sinister robed figure reflected in my glasses.

“Bloody Hell,” I’ll say, “This was approved by twelve different people.”

My task was to select three or four options from Alan’s shoot of a hundred. It’s a sort of torture to look at so many samey pictures of yourself. It’s like when you say the same word over and over until it loses all meaning, the worst word to plunge into meaninglessness being your own name. It’s a sort of existential threshing machine. I’m honestly not sure I could tell the difference now between my own long-serving face and, say, a lemon blancmange.

If I look in the mirror tomorrow and there’s an actual, factual lemon blancmange looking back at me, it’ll seem perfectly reasonable.

If you think this is vanity, it really isn’t. I don’t ever want to see the likes of Me again.

An interesting thing, at least, in looking at so many versions of what is essentially the same photograph is how the slightest angle of the head or the merest flicker of a thought on the lips can change a picture’s meaning so drastically. It’s like how the right or wrong choice of word can nail a sentence or leave it feeling too breezy or stilted. Though I don’t remember doing anything drastically different in any of these shots, the mood varies between “candidate for Young Journalist of the Year” and “it’s a good job we caught him when we did, m’lud.”

The Sellafield Special

Look at this brilliant-green spongecake I’m about to eat.

I’m not sure the photograph does justice to how tremblingly, retina-searingly green it is, but if you imagine a plutonium halo around it you’ll get the idea. It looks like it was baked in the reacor core at Sizewell B.

Ah, well. Here goes. Yum-yum-yum.

I’ll report any residual superpowers to the diary tomorrow. On the other hand, if I don’t make an entry, it’s probably because I’m out for a walk on the surface of the sun or something.

Lacan

On that train last night, Laura and I spent some time discussing whether I’m “a neurotic, a pervert, or a psychotic.”

I’m sorry to say this wasn’t idle flirting. Laura is an expert in Lacanian analysis and those are the three personality types Lacan describes. She sees herself as a neurotic and believes that I’m one too.

She’s probably right but I try to convince her I’m a pervert anyway, since this is surely the best of those three things.

“You used to collect stamps,” she says.

“But for pleasure,” I say, “for pleasure.”

It’s the latest instalment, I fear, in trying to convince the world (and myself) that I’m more Muskrat than Hemulen. (These are the Jansson personality types I’m into.)

Passenger Announcement at Croy

On the way home from Edinburgh, the train is frighteningly full and some drunk boys are “tanning” their Buckfast. They shout “Fuck the passengers!” and “Fuck yer Festival!”

It’s not even the last train home. We’d torn ourselves away early in the hopes of avoiding this all-too-predictable Hell. Thankfully, nimble Laura runs ahead and snags a four-seat table for our party. This is more than just a miracle: I never assume sitting will be possible on a festival train. My habit is to stand in the vestibule, cling onto a pole with my bum cheeks, and to hope against hope that there aren’t so many passengers that my face ends up squashed against the glass.

The relief of being able to sit under these conditions–and with friends instead of strangers!–is more blissful than I can describe. I cannot believe our luck and I barely notice when we pull out of Waverley ten minutes late.

Even so, the hot train is rammed with human meat. The standees puff and blow and roll their eyes. It’s awful. The train even feels heavy and I imagine the back bumper screeching against the rails and leaving sparks in our wake.

There’s a passenger announcement at Croy (a station whose name I always think sounds like a small tinned fish), to apologise for the delay. Astonishingly, it explains that the train managers had wilfully departed late to “let as many passengers board as possible.” What?

Sporran

There’s a chap wearing a kilt at a train platform this morning, and Samara’s delighted when he produces a mobile phone from his sporran.

Life in Modern Scotland!

“Maybe it’s an Aye Phone?” I offer.

She stares silently at my face all the way to Edinburgh.

Twilight of the Word

I’m reading the Edgeworks edition of The Harlan Ellison Hornbook.

It probably has more front matter (introductions, dedications, author’s notes, copyright declarations, etc.) than any book I’ve ever seen. That’s if we don’t consider Tristram Shandy to be an entire novel of front matter or indeed The Book of Prefaces to be, well, a book of prefaces.

Anyway, after a page of gorgeous five-inch-long, hoary old URLs to Ellison-related websites, there’s this:

Was he right? My gut says “yes” but my head cranks out a ticker tape of hyper-rational excuses and exceptions.

I’m enjoying the book, by the way; it was in the batch I borrowed from Unclef. I’m forming an opinion that Ellison was more “alive” than anyone currently living can claim to be alive, “all this electronic crap” likely being part of the reason for this clear and sudden loss of gross global consciousness.

Too Many Oranges

There was some sort of mix-up with our weekly grocery order and this morning’s delivery includes forty easy-peel oranges.

I’m not sure what to do with them all. Email me if you want an orange and I’ll send you one.

Video

Today I made a one-minute video to represent my book at the publisher’s sales conference. It’s one of those things that shouldn’t–mustn’t!–take much time but inevitably does.

No matter how strict you are when going into the job–“I will not spend more than two hours on this”–it was always bound to devour the whole day.

It starts with the discovery that you’re out of practice at speaking to a camera or ad-libbing at all and so it takes you about thirty takes to get it right, even though all you’re doing is saying “Hi, it’s me, and here’s what my latest book is about.” Why is that so difficult? It wouldn’t be hard if you were explaining it to someone in the pub, so why is it such a rotten thing to get right when you’re on your own in a room with a recording device?

A good recording is ruined because you realise there’s a moth on your glasses or that a lamp in another room casts a weird glow against a wall and onto your face, making you look like you’re telling a campfire ghost story. Oh, and the Swiss cheese plant you’ve been using for background colour seems uncannily to be doing the bunny-ears thing behind your head.

After three or four hours, you finally have some serviceable footage. But then you need to edit it for time and quality. You cut the “ums” and “erms” and a bit where you nervously swallow, giving the game away that you’re not a professional speaker at all but some sort of carbon-based creature susceptible to peristalsis who probably even has an entire digestive system and lives with all the disgraces such a thing would suggest.

Somehow, all of your pruning and worrying makes things worse and your image on the screen begins to look like a glitching Max Headroom and you just have to start again.

After a while, you’re so tired of looking at your own mouth that it’s giving you the creeps. Is that even a mouth? Is that what people look at when you’re facing them? It’s not so much the kissing and pontificating vehicle you’d always imagined was on the front of your head but some sort of fissure, like the kind of thing you’d see on a fluke worm or a nematode.

The moon is rising but you press on regardless and emails are coming in to ask where the heck your video is and you idly consider attending the the sales conference in person so that you could just explain yourself.

Finally — finally! — you get something together that looks like a passable sales video. It’s twenty seconds too long but sod it you’re only human and your dinner’s going cold.

You set the thing to export in the highest available resolution, not because you’re mad for resolution or anything but because you imagine that’s what a professional video spod would do. In truth, you don’t know what “resolution” even is aside from that a high one is how the Marvel Cinematic Universe is presented and so that’s probably what people expect to see, right?

While you’re eating dinner, you’re wondering all the while if the export has finished yet and also how you’ll beam such a monstrously large file into a conference room in Munich anyway.

You go and check on it–tentatively tapping the track-pad to wake the screen up without accidentally erasing everything–and then, when the video masterpiece fades into life, you see it:

The basket of laundry in the background.

Fuck. Everything.

Snob Moths

My trousers, dear diary, have fallen.

To moths I mean.

And not just any trousers. These were the long-loved, Italian wool Cad & The Dandy trousers. They were something of a souvenir of the days when I could afford such things. I’d had them for over ten years and I’d been planning to pass them down to my children or, failing that, to someone else’s. Or maybe to the Robert Wringham Memorial Library and Museum.

But now, all is lost. They’re in the outside bin now, riddled with minibeasts, and waiting for Stinky (our local tramp and victim of nominative determinism) to dig out.

Clearly, our moths are snob moths, for they have not touched any of our other clothes. Only the finest dining will satisfy this winged Hun.

Well, I hope you are satisfied, moths, because this means War. Capital “W” and everything.

I claimed upwards of thirty of their number today, just stopping short at mounting their heads on teeny-tiny pikes.

I vacuumed the floorboards–thoroughly–to rattle their cage a bit. Then I squashed any that happened to flutter up into the room. Then I set the pheromone trap, which has so far claimed five. Then, after thoroughly checking for other damage, I zip-locked anything that might constitute a food supply. Then I raided the DMZ (by which I mean the hall closet, which I thought the moths mutually understood to be neutral territory). Raiding that closet, where so many of them hang like bats during daylight hours, was like that bit in John Carpenter’s Vampires where they tear the walls off the undead’s dosshouse to bring them screaming into the sunlight.

As night falls, I find myself bare-chested and bellowing into the stars, face smeared red with the blood of my enemies. Or, as the case may be, slightly dusty with their wing powder.

Bigness

Once, in London, I stopped to briefly look at the houses of parliament. An American tourist was squinting up at the clock tower with a strange look on his face so I asked him what he thought of it. “It’s not very big,” he said.

I’d never thought of “bigness” as a quality the clock tower was supposed to possess, but later it occurred to me that “Big Ben” might in fact promise bigness.

It left me wondering if tourists come from all over the world to visit what I see as a symbol of democracy or Imperialism, expecting to see “a big clock.”

I’m working on a travel book at the moment, part of which involves transcribing and learning from the travel journals of a friend, Wentworth, who has been to all manner of places including Myanmar, Iran, and North Korea. From Washington DC he writes:

I have read complaints that the White House is underwhelmingly small but I found it to be a rare example of restraint in the USA.

There it is again! The tourist expectation of bigness. I now wonder if an assumption of bigness comes from a reverence for powerful institutions (since my sample concerns only UK and US government buildings) or if a sense of awe comes, like an optical illusion, from sheer distance or the promise of pilgrimage.

Answers on a postcard.

A Memorable Sandwich

Side by side this evening, Samara reads Samuel Pepys while I read Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso.

Manguso:

To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget. A memorable sandwich, an unmemorable flight of stairs. A memorable bit of conversation surrounded by chatter that no one records.

Pepys, meanwhile, has noticed that wigs are in vogue and he instructs a barber to shave his head so that he can then (get this) go around London wearing a wig made from his own hair. Pepys tells his diary how delighted he is that nobody can tell, so authentic is his wig. I’m not sure why covert wig-wearing is his response to fashionable, conspicuous wig-wearing.

When my wife points out that she’s reading a diary at the very same time that I’m reading a book about a diary, we pause so I can write my diary for yesterday to complete the cycle: writing, reading, analysing. When I post, Samara checks to see how it looks on her phone. “It’s real!” she says.

I think the current diary mania in our house began when Peter asked a few months ago why I like diaries so much. I hadn’t noticed (but he had) that I read a lot of diaries. Since I hadn’t noticed, I couldn’t answer but I have been thinking about it since. This evening, Manguso’s book comes close to hitting on an answer I can identify with:

I often prefer writers’ diaries to their work written intentionally for publication. It’s as if I want the information without the obstacles of style or form. But of course all writing possesses style and form, and in good writing they aren’t obstacles.

Another friend said, I want to write sentences that seem as if no one wrote them. The goal being the creation of a pure delivery system, without the distraction of a style. The goal being a form no one notices, the creation of what seems like pure feeling, not of what seems like a vehicle for a feeling. Language as pure experience, pure memory. I too wanted to achieve that impossible effect.

Alan’s Arse

Poking around in the University gift shop with Alan today, he hands me a leather key fob and asks that I decipher the embossed text on the back of it. “Is it a name?” he asks.

I squint at it and read it aloud:

GENUINE HIDE LEATHER, it says, MADE IN SCOTLAND.

“That’s what it says on your arse isn’t it?” I say.

Well, one of us had to. It was hanging there in space. Like Alan’s arse.

Companies House of Murder

I learn today from All Killa No Filla that Patrick Mackay’s nickname was “The Psychopath.”

Well, that’s hardly good enough is it?

Usually, a serial killer’s nickname is location-based (e.g. “The Beast of Legoland”) or it comes from their victim demographic (“The Drycleaner Murders”), murder method (“The Fuzzy Felt Killer”), or origin story (“Son of Scrabble”).

I know serial killers don’t line up to register their name at some sort of Companies House of Murder, but calling yourself “The Psychopath” is like going around as “The Killer Man” or something. Just Rubbish. Note to all serial killers: the nickname should distinguish you against the other serial killers, not the general public.

Hey, if your thing was strangling tourists at Loch Ness, would you be called “The Loch Ness Monster” or would you run into trouble with the Companies House of Cryptids? Genuine Question.

The Red Dragon

An email pops into my inbox concerning “medical tattoos.”

At first I can’t parse what a medical tattoo is most likely be. The two concepts aren’t at odds exactly, but one rarely sees them side by side. Are people having Grays Anatomy-style heart diagrams in place of the traditional love hearts now? Are stethoscopes the new horseshoes?

The email is not spam. It’s from the Ectodermal Dysplasia Society (I have ED and I’m on their mailing list) and they’re asking for research participants. Medical Tattooing seems to be geared towards the correction of burns or scars or skin discolouration.

I have some mild eczema scarring on my back and I vainly consider having it dealt with through tattoos. Before I know it though, I’m considering the merits of just getting the full Red Dragon and being done with it.

If nothing else, I’d be the first person sporting that particular tattoo to also use the phrase, “in for a penny, in for a pound.”