Thursday, October 5, 2017

Tattoos of the Dead



Victims of time and circumstance.  I always liked that line.  T.C. Boyle.  Surely he stole it, though.  Borrowed, I mean.  Uncredited still, if he did.  It is one of the lines I consider putting on my headstone.  If I have one, that is.  Is it too soon to say something disparaging about the news coverage of the terrible tragedy?  Sure.

But I don't know.  About what to put on my tombstone, I mean.  It seems irrevocable, like a tattoo.  I have never gotten a tattoo.  I can't even settle on a paint color for the wall.

"Does that yellow seem to have green in it?  I don't know.  It looks too green to me."

My father had a WWII tattoo.  It was his first wife's name in a heart.  Trixie.  Yup.  I shit you not.  I don't think my mother cared for that much.  He tried to sandpaper it off, I think.  It was so blurred in my childhood that you couldn't really read it.  I never met her, of course, but from what I heard, she was something of a free spirit.  Names may be destiny.

Perhaps I'll never settle on a saying or a tombstone.  They are the tattoos of the dead.

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