Let's Face It!!

Let's face it!  Kids are stupid!  If they were so dumb, they wouldn't be in school from age five to eighteen and more.  To think that a kid will know what they want to do for the rest of their lives at age sixteen or seventeen is ludicrous.  When I was a wee little kid, I wanted to grow up to be a fire truck.  Not a fireman or the fireman who drives the big ladder truck, but the ladder truck, itself.  Why?  Kids are stupid, that's why.  At such a young age, especially these days, kids are quite unaware of how much work is required to achieve life goals.  I spoke with a former co-worker yesterday, who said they're having problems keeping staff at her place of work, citing one girl turned in her ID card, stating that she didn't know "work was this hard", then quit.

These terrible decisions are also true of those young folks who decide to get all tattooed up.  I'm a fan of good tattoos, but I believe they have to make sense.  Be artistic, yes.  Be meaningful, yes, to a degree.  Be logistically placed, yes, of course.  Be placed upon one's face?  F*ck no.  Unless you're a tattoo artist, a rock star or a lifelong convict, there's no place for face tattoos, and even then, I question the logical decision to do so. 🤔

Unless you're extremely lucky, like former gang member, Jeremy Meeks, who was arrested in 2014 as a result of a "cease fire" campaign by the Stockton (California) Police Department, for weapons violations.  The PD eventually posted Meeks' photo, along with some other convicted felons, on their Facebook page and the LIKES began flooding in and eventually garnered the young felon with a modeling career, from which he's never looked back on his criminal enterprises.  That was a fluke.  A one-in-a-million chance that paid off.  If the Stockton PD hadn't posted his photo, chances are, the young man would have returned to his criminal roots and would likely have been in jail or deceased on this day.

Today's celebrities should be leading by example, not inspiring those who worship them, to make ill-planned body modifications that would not benefit anyone not in their industry.  Face tattoos should be discouraged.

I am a tattoo connoisseur, although I haven't gotten one in more than a decade.  It just hasn't been financially feasible in the past few years.  I once had the belief that I didn't want a tattoo below my elbows, so that I could still get a decent job.  Then my friend Darcy passed away and I thought the best way to commemorate his life, in a way that I would always remember him, I placed a tattoo on my lower arm.  This allowed me to repeat my fond memory of Darcy when asked about the tattoo.  As good of a friend as Darcy was, I would never have posted a memorial tattoo of him on my face.

Perhaps I'm just an old fuddy-duddy, now, complaining about all those tattooed kids, but that's furthest from the point.  I just don't believe that face tattoos are a smart decision.  Case and point: This fellow to the right of this paragraph.  Loved the rap group Insane Clown Posse, so much, that as a young man, he had the group's face paint tattooed permanently onto his face.  A decision that he's come to regret in recent years, as he's never been able to establish a decent job.  Even one of the member's of ICP, commented on the idiocy of this man's decision, on an episode of Your Moms House Podcast with Tom Segura and Christina Pazsitzky (Christina P).  Whoever put that tattoo on this young man's face, (A) did a shit job of it and (B) should have refused to put the tattoo on his face.

Tattoo artists should have some say in the placement of said tattoos.  Aside from just being an artist, I believe tattooists need to be a sort of guidance counsellor, too.  It's their art on display, after all.  They should want it represented in the best light, not something looked upon daily with regret and disdain.

Another case and point:  This seventeen year old discovered the music of rapper, Tekashi 69, and as an homage to his favourite rapper, decided he was going to get all the tattoos of his hero.  He's just a child, making childish decisions, not taking into account the results of these rash decisions.  What makes this case even more jarring, is that his mother paid the bill for her child to look like the former gang member, turned American rapper.  This kid is in Russia, so either he's been drafted to fight in the War With Ukraine or his been imprisoned.  I'm leaning toward the latter, to be honest.

I have just three tattoos, myself.  The first one I ever got, was of Alistair Fiend from Motley Crue's Dr. Feelgood album.  It's an incredible tattoo placed there by a young apprentice who went on to get a job with Dark Horse Comics in New York City.  I wish I could remember the fella's name.  The second is an ICP tattoo, but it's of the Hatchet Man on my left calf.  Then the third is the memorial tattoo on my left forearm.  One day, I'd like to get a picture of my little boy, Monkey, over my heart.

Kids are stupid.  They don't know about cause and effect.  Not nowadays.  People coddle their children so f*cking much that kids don't know what the world has instore for them.  That every choice they make has consequences.  As established grown ups and mature individuals, we have a responsibility to help guide the younger generation, despite their having chips on their shoulders that they know what's best for this or that.  They don't.  They're dumb.

If there's any hope of the younger generation leading our world into the future, they can't have any past bad decisions haunting them as they maneuver their way into the future.  I have hopes that the future will be bright and hopeful, like in Star Trek.  Clean and law-abiding, not dirty and scorched, like that of Mad Max, although the latter seems more and more likely with each passing day. 😕

I'm not against self expression.  Everyone should be allowed to stand out in their own special way, but there should be a line that shouldn't be crossed over.  Perhaps it's not wrong to emblazon oneself with face tattoos, but it's not widely accepted, either.  I know that if I were hiring for a position in my company, it'd be very difficult to choose a highly qualified person with shit plastered all over their face, rather than the clean looking person who is underqualified.  After all, this is a person who would be representing my company.  The face that the public sees and I wouldn't want my product being represented by someone who has dozens of micro-tats placed all over their face like shredded confetti.  Maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy, nowadays, but there has to be some kind of order replenished in today's society.

There's a kid who gets on my bus every once in awhile.  He's maybe 17 or 18.  Face tattoos all across his forehead and cheeks.  He doesn't appear to have much of a future.  He just roams around aimlessly, hopping this bus and that bus, without any real destination.  I sometimes will see him laid out on the side of the road, staring aimlessly up into the sky.  He's a young man.  No apparent future, but to get high everyday and roam about without anywhere to go and any responsibilities.  I fear this is the destiny of many people who choose to get face tattoos.  I'm not insinuating that the two necessarily go hand-in-hand, but they're in the same vicinity.

I shouldn't care so much, I guess.  I have my shit in order.  I should only worry about my own situation and leave everyone else to their decisions.  Both bad and good.  As long as my tax dollars don't pay for their bad decisions, which I suspect they do, I should just be satisfied.  Satisfied and well aware that: Kids are stupid!

Double Digits - Ten Years of "Loud 'n' Proud"

It was New Year's Day 2006, when I received the phone call that my friend, Darcy Corrigan, had passed away unexpectedly.  After only twenty-eight years on this mortal coil, his shining light was extinguished, but not forgotten from the hearts of all who knew and loved him.

Darcy was a generous, funny, smart, no bullshit kind of guy and though I wasn't as close to him as some, having known this amazing fella, has influenced my life in more ways than I could even know.  His generosity, alone, was more than I could fathom.  One story sticks out particularly.  It occurred just a little over a month before his passing.  It was my birthday and there were lots of people taking me out for dinner followed by some drunken karaoke.  A common practice for a few of us, at the time.  Darcy was living and working out of town, at the time, so I never expected to see him show up for my little soiree, but he did.  Despite working all that Saturday and having to open his store up the following Sunday morning, Darcy traveled the two-and-a-half-PLUS distance, following his shift, to pick me up from my house, take me to where everyone was meeting for supper, then on to the karaoke bar, doing in all with the often seen, rarely photographed smile on his face, as observed in the photograph above.

I think of Darcy everyday.  I have a tattoo on my left forearm, as a memoriam to Darcy, of a lone woman in a red dress.  "Why such an obscure tattoo?", you ask.  On one of the many occasions that we had gone out for a rousing night of drink and song, a friend and I thought it'd be funny if we signed up our usually silent cohorts for a song.  The first was "Funky Town" for the normally reserved Boyd, who performed to song stunningly.  So good he was, in fact, that months later when another friend attempted the song, he got up to instruct them.  For Darcy, however, we decided to tame things down for him and requested "Lady In Red" by Chris de Burgh.  My friend and I were waiting to chuckle when he bombed, but there were nothing but the sweetest notes coming from his breath.  So memorable was his performance, that every time I've heard that song on the radio, since, I am reminded of Darcy.

It was nine years ago, New Year's Day, when I answered the phone and received the heartbreaking news.  I never cried at the death of my father in the same way that I did with Darcy's passing.  Maybe it was because of how unexpected it was.  At the funeral, I met Darcy's family for the first time.  It was no wonder that Darcy grew into the incredible man that he was, surrounded by such a loving family as this.  It was a time where it was beneficial to be a wallflower.  To sit back and listen to all the amazing stories where Darcy was a main focal point.  I got to see and live his life via some sort of magic in those couple of days and in the years since.

Every year, beginning in the summer of 2006, a mass conglomeration of family treks from the recesses of western Canada, migrating to Regina for a Saskatchewan Roughrider game, in what has come to be known as: The Darcy Corrigan Memorial Game Weekend.  The numbers have dwindled some, from that initial game, but given how tough life has been getting for people, I can't blame them.  I've fallen on tough financial times in the last five-plus years, but as tough as I see it, I think of how Darcy traveled all that distance to spend a few hours with me and friends on my birthday, only to race home again to open his store for the morning traffic.  That kind of generosity, boggles my mind, to this day.  I go to the Memorial Weekend, just for that reason.  That and I love his family.  More so than my own, in some instances, if I gotta be honest.

Darcy's been absent from this world of a little over nine years, but he's remained LOUD 'n' PROUD in our hearts and minds for TEN years.  So this weekend, whether you knew Darcy or not, I hope you'll raise your glass in his memory, anyway.  R.I.P. Darcy Corrigan.  I can't wait to meet up with you on the other side.

If Stupidity is a Handicap, Then We Are Doomed!

While awaiting my turn in line at the Wal-Mart, a young mother was unloading her cart in front of me.  Accompanying her was a small child and another who was visibly older.  The eldest child was fidgety, picking at the magazines and candy in the impulse lane, finally setting her attention on a cold bottle of Coca-Cola in a nearby cooler.  "Mom." she said, trying to engage her mother.  "Mom!!  Can I have?"

The pencil-thin young woman turned to her daughter, allowing me the first real look at her.  She was a frail thing, who didn't look very old.  The eldest daughter was clearly over the age of ten, possibly entering her teens, so I speculate that she was a teen mom.  Her frame was petite as were her facial features.  The only prominence that this woman had, were a small cluster of stars tattooed over her left eye.  They appeared to be fairly fresh, although, there wasn't any redness or swelling accompanying them.

"NO!!" the young mother said sternly, shaking her finger, "You need to learn to spend your money more responsibly.  Don't waste it on frivolous things."

I smirked at what she had said.  Not that saving your money for smarter purchases is a preposterous notion, but that such sage advice would come from a person who had recently wasted money on getting stars of varying sizes tattooed on her face.

I thought nothing of it, beyond that.  I paid for my goods and ventured outside, where I met up with the able-bodied family once more.  This time they were climbing into a shitty little red Chevy Cavalier, parked in the handicapped spot nearest the door.  It is sights like this that bother me.  If you're not physically incapable of walking a few extra meters, then you shouldn't be taking up those spots.  It doesn't matter if you have the handicapped placard in your window.  If the handicapped person is not with you, don't f*cking park in the spot, because the last time I checked, stupidity wasn't considered a handicap.