My Whole Expanse I Cannot See…

So, this tattoo actually came from a piece of writing from a very bizarre tv mini-series, The Prisoner. Normally, at least to me, tv writing isn’t particularly sharp. I don’t remember any one line from Lost, or Battlestar Galactica. Okay, I actually remember lots of lines from South Park, but I don’t think I want, “I like dancin’, and ponies, and getting my snootch pounded on Friday nights,” tattooed on me. Nothing I’d ever heard on tv had ever affected me enough to want to carry it around on my skin forever, until I heard Ian McKellen say so plainly, “Love is a torment, or it is not love.”

Tattoo by Colt, resident badass at Las Vegas Tattoo, Ybor City

Love is a torment, love is the most difficult easy thing in the world. Being in love with someone means caring for them so deeply, you’ll do anything to make them smile, keep them safe. If that particular person isn’t around for awhile, you miss them, their absence is palpable. The absence becomes something weighty, a painful heaviness in the chest. When you love someone, you don’t want to be apart. You want to fall asleep holding that person close, you want to kiss them slow, and their face is the first thing you want to see when you wake in the morning. Without that closeness, and that kiss, and that face next to yours, bathed in soft morning sunlight, it’s almost difficult to breathe sometimes, difficult to think. Loving someone so completely, you don’t ever want to lose that person, the thought of being apart forever gets to be terrifying. That’s the cost of feeling something so spectacular, the pain of distance, the fear of loss.

So yes, love is a torment, or it is not love.

So, on the outside of my left hand I have this tattoo, Silence. I’m pretty sure one’s immediate reaction to the tattoo is, “Oh, he can’t talk, that’s sad.” I’m not that simple though, it has nothing to do with me not talking.

Really, it’s the title of my favorite PJ Harvey song. To me, it’s a song about the silence one experiences in loneliness, the silence one experiences in longing for affection that is not returned. It’s such an absolutely perfect piece of writing. It captures so many feelings, loneliness, longing, pain, frustration, unrequited love, regret, in just a few words. As a writer, the song always amazes me. The song also reminds me very much of things I’ve felt in the last few years. So…

Tattoo by Colt, hardcore fuckin' badass at Doc Dog's Las Vegas Tattoo, Ybor City

We all have a little voice in our head, our internal monologue. Sometimes, that voice is all clear, and up, and bright. Other times, that voice is all fucked up. It’s loud, it’s angry, it’s depressed, it’s happy, it’s depressed, it contradicts itself, and it’s absolutely never quiet. To me, that’s much of what Nirvana’s Lithium is about, that broken, disconnected, restless voice that loves and hates itself. It reminds me of me often enough.

So, now, I have thirty tattoos.

Tattoo by Colt, hardcore fuckin' badass at Doc Dog's Las Vegas Tattoo, Ybor City

So, here we are, my twenty-ninth tattoo. It’s from one of my favorite Nirvana songs, Dumb.

Tattoo by Colt, hardcore fuckin' badass at Doc Dog's Las Vegas Tattoo, Ybor City

Dumb, to me, is a song about depression, about loneliness, about being broken, and chasing an illusion to make it all better. It’s about hiding darkness with a destructive sort of light. Liquor, drugs, pick your vice, anything to make life feel better, if only for a little while. I know what it’s like to be so dumb, to chase happiness that isn’t real.

So, it’s the afternoon before my last trache change. My friend, Kim, and I are just sort of lazed out and listening to music. I’m trying to decide on my pre-trache change tattoo. I always get at least one in between traches, it’s been my routine for awhile. I have a bunch of ideas, different lyrics from different songs. They’re all good, but they don’t fit my current melancholy. Then Elliott Smith starts singing A Distorted Reality is Now a Necessity to Be Free. He sings, “I’m floating in a black balloon…” I say to Kim, “Oh, idea! Draw me a black balloon…” She grabs a notebook, and a cheap black pen, and she draws something perfect.

Tattoo by Colt, hardcore fuckin' badass at Doc Dog's Las Vegas Tattoo, Ybor City

It’s a perfect visual metaphor for how I feel much of the time, just floating around all lonely, all dark.

So, there’s this Nirvana song, Hairspray Queen, and my favorite line ended up being my twenty-seventh tattoo…

I don’t sleep easily. I have trouble turning off my head, I almost never feel content enough to just close my eyes and drift off. I’ve tried liquor to lull me, and meds to make things fade, but honest to Christ sleep is very rare to me. I don’t sleep, I have only the dark to keep me company more often than not. I stay up, sometimes until the night starts to go from black, to grey, to blue. I stay up, and think about so much.

At night, I always feel things that I want so badly, things that the day can drown out. Most nights, I just want a particular someone asleep next to me, asleep with my arm around her. When she’s close I don’t feel lonely, night is actually peaceful. Loneliness is the feeding I hate most, loneliness is all that scares me anymore. Loneliness is why some nights I’ve felt like opening my wrists just to make it stop. At night, what I want is so clear, and the wanting is so intense, whether it’s something beautiful, or… not.

Tattoo by Colt, hardcore fuckin' badass at Doc Dog's Las Vegas Tattoo, Ybor City

“At night, wish the hardest…” It’s so true, at least to me.

So, a few months back, I had a poem published in an issue of Weird Tales Magazine, and I wrote it a few months before that.  I got the idea in my head listening to a Nirvana song, Stain. I was feeling especially lonely, especially empty, and the song just sounded so right. I felt like a stain, something awful. I wanted to take the word “stain” as a metaphor and make it something more literal. I wanted to write about how being close to someone can end up causing so much pain, how it can cost a person everything. I wanted to write something beautiful, and dark, and brutal, all at once. So, I went out, had couple of vodka tonics, and wrote what I wrote. It’s just a quick little piece about a woman who seems beautiful, and this fellow, and an encounter that ends very badly. I wrote that, and it got published.

I often still feel the way I felt when I wrote You’re a Stain, and it’s the first thing I’ve ever had published in print, and I love the song…

Tattoo by Colt, hardcore fuckin' badass at Doc Dog's Las Vegas Tattoo, Ybor City

Hence tattoo #26.

On of my favorite Alanis Morissette songs is Purgatorying, it’s from her Feast on Scraps CD/DVD set. To me, it’s a song about lifeless life, filing up with nothing meaningful, wandering toward nothing. It’s a song about being numb, spending so much time feeling empty, yet never acknowledging it because it’s terrifying to acknowledge being broken, and not knowing how to fix it. I’ve felt so much like this song for so long. I’ve felt it, and I acknowledged that feeling in pain and ink…

Tattoo by Colt, artist and badass at Doc Dog's Las Vegas Tattoo in Ybor City, Tampa

So, I spend a lot of time bored, lonely, feeling empty, almost never content, but I’m putting it in writing. I’m not pretending nothing’s wrong, not as of right now. Writing this, I’m starting to feel so much wasted time, I can’t stay like this, Purgatorying until my end. Lately, I’ve been so fucked up, afraid to say things because I honestly have no idea what might happen after they’re said, both in my writing and relationships. I’ve been afraid to say what I want to say, so I haven’t been saying anything. I’ve been confusing patience with abject fear, mixed with self-loathing. I want to look back on this time in my life, I want to look at this tattoo from a good place, and truly appreciate being there because I remember what it was like to feel lost, and empty, and dark. I could also never end up in that good place, stories don’t have to end well, but I’d rather get to that end having written everything, said everything. If zombies showed up in the morning, I’d feel pretty fucking stupid, like I wasted so much.

There’s a song in the Nirvana With the Lights Out Box Set, Verse Chorus Verse (Outtake). It’s a song about addiction, about the love/hate relationship one can have with a fix. It’s not a sad song about hitting a fix, it’s more an honest, rational look at how the relationship with a fix can feel. It’s probably my favorite piece of Kurt Cobain’s writing, because it’s so right. It’s all about knowing that you’re ultimately hurting yourself in exchange for moments of absolute peace, perfect clarity. Kurt’s said that heroin was the only thing that ever gave him any sort of comfort. He was a nervous, depressed fellow in constant physical pain, and as awful or as wrong as it sounds, I think heroin kept him alive and helped to kill him at the same time. My favorite line in the song, “the grass is greener over here, you’re the fog that keeps it clear…” From my experience, it’s very true. I mean, after I died for a bit and spent two months in the hospital, I was high on all sorts of pain-killers as often as possible. Sometimes, I wasn’t particularly in any physical pain, I was just so fucking scared all the time, that fog was the only thing that let me relax and feel like I could be okay. I knew that I couldn’t live on Fentanyl, that it was a poisonously beautiful illusion of safety, but I also know that I couldn’t have coped without it. I think I understand how Kurt felt, I understand the song. So… I had part of it etched into my arm.

Tattoo by Colt, artist and badass at Doc Dog's Las Vegas Tattoo in Ybor City, Tampa

There are fixes that are definitely dangerous, definitely destructive. Still, I don’t think all fixes are inherently bad. We all need something to soften the noise of the day, the week, the month, the year. A cup or twelve of coffee, a shot of vodka with dinner, a lover’s kiss before falling asleep at night, they’re all fixes. We all need little things that give some peace, that make breathing seem worthwhile. I have my set of fixes these days, the things that dull the static in my head enough to think, enough to write, enough to feel like waking up in the morning is a good idea. Fixes that damn, fixes that save, the trick is knowing which is which when you wake up in the morning.

So, my friend, Kim, is over, all lazed out in my cushy red leather chair. Kim all pale, black hair tied back in a pony-tail, her soft blue eyes watching Fight Club with my blue-green eyes watching Fight Club just the same. She looks all languid and cozy, an angel without wings to fly away. Still, before I talk about Kim, and Fight Club, and my twenty-third tattoo, I should talk about my room.

The room’s practically a goth club, dark purple walls, doors painted black, a deep red ceiling to match the cushy leather chair. The purple walls aren’t bare though, that would be boring. They’re covered in art, some unique, some not. Cemetery photos, koi swimming in a tranquil pond, a sad looking girl sitting in a chair, pieces drawn or painted by friends with talent in such things. Sure, I have a few mass produced pieces. There’s the Brooklyn Bridge canvas from Urban Outfitters, the bridge where Henry Letham was in too much pain to stay. There’s the wrought iron IKEA mirror. People say it’s a comfortable room, dark, yet warm, inviting. Not that it was always so. The way it is now, all stylish and alluring, it reflects the me in my head. Two years back, however, it was drab, empty, with pale green walls covered in anime artwork that seemed brilliant when I was twenty-two. At twenty-six, the room reflected nothing but apathy. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t care enough to tear it apart and create something more me, something beautiful and decadent. It took a little shove to wipe away the apathy, it took a woman. This woman, I loved, the sort of love that makes a fellow happy to take a zombie bite for her. Two years ago, we were apart but still friends. Not that I didn’t want her back, not that it didn’t drive me crazy just looking at her. I wanted her with me again, in that room, tearing each other’s clothes off at night, waking together in the morning. So, when she said to me one evening, in that dull room, her sitting on the floor leaning against my bed, “look, I just don’t think I could be with a guy who has anime art on the walls,” I got clear. I forgot about the trache, and not talking, and months in the hospital. In a few weeks, I created a space that reflected the me that wanted a lover, and friends. Not that apathetic kid who spent every night alone, with only academic knowledge of what it’s like to touch a woman, naked and vulnerable, until she begs you to come inside. We did tear each other’s clothes off again, we did fall asleep warm together, waking up in the little goth lounge I created for us.

Fast forward to me two years later, to me without that woman I loved, gone for good this time. I don’t hate the room, I don’t want to burn it down. I want to bring new life into this space. Just now, I’m thinking about a woman who I want next to me in the dark, someone who’s smart, and gorgeous, and different. A woman who makes the room feel like it’s supposed to feel. I think about slowly kissing her, running the tips of my fingers under her chin, down her neck, toward the places of her I haven’t seen.

Fast forward to me and Kim watching the end of Fight Club, to the part when the narrator says to Marla just before the whole controlled demolition thing happens, “you’ve met me at a very strange time in my life.” That line really hit me with Kim sitting there. I met Kim not too long ago, but we hang out a lot. We get along perfectly. Yet, it always strikes me that people who meet me now, post-trache, post Sara (the ex from paragraph two), don’t really know how different my life was three years ago. I was a shit writer, didn’t have assistants, didn’t leave the house without family, didn’t have any friends who weren’t online, didn’t paint my nails, didn’t have tattoos, didn’t drink, didn’t know what it was like to get high, never had a girlfriend, never had sex. In three years I’ve changed all that, and I lost the ability to talk, and almost died in the middle of everything. I lost Sara twice, the first time was bad, the second time was worse than getting trached and realizing that I’d never be able to speak again. People see me out with an assistant and think I’ve been doing it forever, but I’m still having so many new experiences, and learning, and adapting. Whenever I do something new with an assistant, or a friend does something, like, gives me a drink through my feeding tube, I get all excited. It’s not so much that I’m surprised that I have all these new experiences, it’s that I’m just astonishingly happy about them. Independence is like a drug, and the more I live the life I’ve always seen in my head, the more I know I can’t go back. The thing is, I’ve never thought like I’m disabled, I’ve never expected less for myself than a fellow who can walk. I mean, I’ve never expected to go hiking, or swimming, or to drive a car, not that I even want those things, but I’ve always expected having friends, and lovers, and autonomy. My problem was, and to a point still is, access to levels of independence that most people get without even thinking. I get really frustrated and often very depressed if I’m not moving forward, or if I feel like I’m moving backward, people don’t always understand some of the reasons why I get so down. I always want to tell people, “you’ve met me at a very strange time in my life,” and now I don’t have to say it. It’s etched into my arm.