Last week at the grocery store the lines were a nightmare - about fifteen minutes long, and the worst sort of fifteen minutes, where you get stuck behind a lady buying a decade's worth of shampoo because there was a newspaper special. But I struck gold in aisle three. Even though it wasn't labeled "Express" or "No Shampoo-Hoarders," the only person in front of me was an old man covered in tattoos, who I guess no one wanted to stand behind.
A lot of my friends have awesome-looking tattoos, and given the permanence of tattoos I'm assuming they'll still have them when they're old. People always say "oh you think tattoos look cool, wait until you're old and saggy and covered in tattoos - what will your grandchildren say?
Here's the thing about that.
A lot of my friends have awesome-looking butts.
Which will also become saggy. A lot of my friends have awesome-looking hair, which will either turn white and inexplicably short and fluffy, or just disappear. And did you know that your nose keeps growing your entire life? According to my albeit limited research, none of these things are caused by tattoos. You can get old and saggy with tattoos, or old and saggy without them. And I don't know about you, but I don't much care what my grandchildren have to say. I'm going to have things to tell them.
I'll use this paragraph to mention that I don't have any tattoos and don't plan on ever getting any. Yet I will still age.
Tattoos when you're old just mean that when you were younger you were awesome. Or I guess this guy could have gotten them last week. He didn't tell me. He did tell me that the groceries I was purchasing were all available at the dollar store a couple blocks over for just a dollar. I thanked him, and then hid my shame with pretend fixation on a National Enquirer cover. It said Demi Moore was trying to commit suicide. I wonder if Demi Moore ever thinks "Wonder what the National Enquirer is saying about me!" Probably not.
Then I walked my overpriced groceries next door to the drugstore to get band-aids.
Unnecessary detail coming up: I needed them because I have a scab the size of North Carolina right between my eyes, that would have healed weeks ago if I could stop touching it. I've been considering a dog cone or constantly wearing mittens, but then I thought of band-aids, and decided to pick some up a the drugstore.
For reasons I no longer remember I ended up in the first aid aisle, absentmindedly picking up all of the creams and reading the labels. I jumped when I heard a voice behind me.
"If you're looking for hydrocortisone don't waste money on the name brand! Look on the back - they've all got the same ingredients!" The man who owned the voice picked up a box and deftly flipped it around "This one's 3%, cheap, perfect, that's what I want!" and threw it confidently in a basket already filled with medications.
This is actually one of my favorite topics, so I jumped right in. "It's all a marketing game," I explained. "I bet you anything there's just one big factory out there making one kind of cream, and all the companies need to do is decide how they're going to package it and market it to make the most profit."
He liked this idea but topped it: "I got bitten by a poisonous spider last night and now my body is filled with its venom." I asked whether it had been in his house or whether he had been out in the wilderness, and crossed my fingers and silently chanted please say wilderness please say wilderness please say wilderness please say "Right in my own home!" he answered and the drugstore changed the radio from oldies to sinister without missing a beat. "It bit me while I was sleeping. You don't like thinking about THAT when you go to bed at night."
I can definitely work with the topic "Things you don't like to think about at night" and specifically remembered a youtube video I'd seen where someone put a vibrating machine in an old house. The vibrations bothered the spiders who were hiding unseen in the thick hollow walls and came pouring out of air vents and cracks by the thousands.
But I was obviously playing way out of my league and couldn't imagine the stories this guy would tell to top my spiders-in-the-walls video, so I bit my tongue. The momentary pain reminded me why I was there, and I picked up a box of bandages.
"Ah, Band-aids!" (what a great way to start a sentence!) "I buy a lot of those." he continued. He explained that he was 62 and bruised very easily, and pointed out a large raisin-colored spot on the back of his hand. "I'll just be doing things..." (he half-heartedly mimed reaching for a box of band-aids) and if my hand gets tapped it will bruise." I asked if band-aids helped prevent bruises - as soon as I said it the idea seemed stupid, but I couldn't think of any other reason.
"No, I wear them to cover my bruises when I go out, because I don't like people having to look at them." He looked down sadly at his hand, and the excitement of talking about spiders and how marketers were screwing with us was gone. My raisin-friend sighed. "I hope that doesn't happen to you when you're older."
Something about a man hoping a complete stranger would be able to avoid all the inevitable pitfalls of age, just because she had interesting opinions on pharmaceutical products and a healthy respect for spiders was so sweet to me that I couldn't think of a better response besides something stupid like "It happens to everyone." Would you hope the same thing for someone so clueless and naive? I remember when I was 15 my younger sisters would always tell me how disgusting my pubescent self was. "You're so gross! You're covered in spots!" and I would think just you wait. Just. You. Wait. The point is I'm not half as good as this man is.
And then I wished my scab were twice as big, because even though that would make it so large it would obscure my vision, it could remind him that these things don't matter. I had a scab the size of a state known for its fantastic wood furniture right in the middle of my face, and now that I'm at home typing I have an off-brand band-aid in the middle of my face, and at the end of the day that is not the most important thing about me. It's a shame that people see our bruises and our tattoos and our horrible self-infliced facial disfigurations before they have time to ask us what we know about spiders or what we're most scared of or what our favorite aisle in the drugstore is. Everyone has things they're not proud of about the way people see them.
And according to most people, all of these things are caused by tattoos.
Hello everyone who skipped to the bottom. Here is a song by the Magnetic Fields. If you're waiting for some water to boil you might want to watch that instead of the visuals in this video.
And here is me with a band-aid on my face. You probably don't get the reference.
