Let Us Know In The Comments What You Think Of This One!
The following is a comment I left in January on a photograph of a tattoo I had done, which was circulating Instagram by the virtue of repost. The page, black noir ink something something, which I think was a just a landing link of the “alt” category of PornHub, swiftly deleted the comment and blocked me. I have a lot of ideas about the graceless commodification of tattooing, through propagating it like a weed in the garden of influence. But, those revelations aren’t best shared with everyone, and I think it’s more fun to imagine how these social farmers react to a confusing comment than an angry one.
The caption to the photo was “Let Us Know In The Comments What You Think Of This One!”
“My pizza is running 20 minutes late. The last pizza’s greasy box still has yet to leave my lap from lunch and the warm oil has left my tracksuit pants looking like the oceans surface behind a laden trawler. Twilight, as rich afternoon amber sinks into azure blues, rendering my eyes more useless than true night, indicates I’ve been dozing on and off since placing the order. I haven’t peed since lunch. I don’t drink much water, coffee mainly. I have two in the morning, black, and then to break up the day I get a latte from the coffee shop on the corner. Today, timing didn’t permit the latte, on account of the first pizza. I slide its cardboard coffin off onto the charnel house of meals past on the table, and unfold into the bathroom. My equilibria on the cusp of dehydration hasn’t changed, and the urine is deep yellow and acrid. I flush, and look in the mirror. I am not good looking, I can affirm. I have wiry black hairs that snake only from under my jawline, interjected with red inflamed pustules. The rest of my face is hairless and graying. My hair is long, similarly wiry to my neck, which I keep tied back in a loose ponytail. Fogging and wiping my glasses on the pizza burdened tracksuit pants, I head back to the loungeroom. It has been more than 20 minutes. I’m hungry. I’m bored.
I throw back on the couch in an exasperated huff, as if throwing my indignation at the problem of the missing pizza is alone enough to reconcile it, and scroll through my phone. I think to look for the delivery number, but before I know it I am scrolling through the Instagram explore feed. Swelling like a tick as I suckle on content that relentlessly rolls through my thumb as I scroll, my satiety isn’t dented. I keep swelling, and keep swelling, and I like and I comment and keep swelling. I have long forgotten about the pizza, hours have passed as my swollen sides encroach on the perimeter of the room now. The pustules on my neck are now oozing under the pressure of my swollen tick innards, soon day will break and my phone is dying.
Dawn has broken and my phone battery flat, the feverish consumption of my nights content over, I shrivel on the living room floor with the pizza boxes. Beams of sun wash over my sleeping body, which has stretched and receded like the belly of a pregnant woman, leaving my skin now wrinkled and marked to the edge of bruising. In blissful rest in the morning sun, my visage a flacid water balloon, I drift in and out of dream and smile.
“That is the shittest fucking tattoo I’ve ever seen”, I mutter.