Car Tattoos

Hummer - Smashing Pumpkins (mp3)

You know the new fad of putting stick figures representing everyone in your family on the back of the family vehicle? I kinda hate it.

I'm going to buy three or four groupings of these stickers and basically fill up my entire back window with them. Me, the husband. Four wives. And 18 children. Maybe a few dogs and cats thrown in for good measure. And I can a bumper sticker that says "If the YFZ Ranch is rockin', don't come a'knockin'!" How awesome would it be to get those looks of judgment and confusion from people driving past you?!

Car tats and bumper stickers are basically the wuss version of flesh ink. The worst ones are pathetic attempts at telling people you don't even give a shit about (a) information they don't need, or (b) things designed to piss off half your audience. At best, bumper stickers are telling a small percentage of people something to make you feel more connected or offer a 1-liner reminiscent of Henny Youngman jokes. That makes the "at best" option pretty God-awful.

These family stickers make Baby On Board seem old fashioned and quaint, pot from the early '70s compared to the more potent booty-kickin' stuff of today. No longer is a simple proclamation of a small infant inside the car enough for you people. We now need to meet every fucking member of your brood and, if we're lucky, learn their names? What an honor, letting us in on this. People shred their mail and won't let their children out of their sight in a mall, but we don't hesitate to reveal juicy child details - name, relative height, relative age - on the back of our car. Apparently child molesters aren't a threat in the express lane.

Don'tcha just know the Octomom (a.k.a. Nadya Suleman) has these damn things on her car? A sticker of her, her 14 children, three cameramen, a producer, an art director and a key grip. Or does she also pepper the outline of the window with little sperm stickers or frozen embryo stickers?

(My favorite responses when I put this observation about Octomom as my status update:

• "The 10 live-in nannies would have to go on the bumper."
• "Her uterus is like a clown car."
• "Her va-jay-jay is a Greyhound!")

Why do we do this? And I'm not talking about making fun of Octomom. I know why we do that.

I've never been big fans of those "My son is an Honor Student..." stickers, or the big softballs with the kid's name and number on them, but at least I get that. They're hardly any more ridiculous than the UNC propaganda I paste on anything I drive. Little trinkets of personal flair, like the buttons on those TGIFriday's overalls. But these family stickers? Is it just 'cuz they're "cute"? 'Cuz they're not. And this isn't just an opinion. It's fact. Go ask God, and He'll quickly tell you that those stick figure families are stupid as hell.

Speaking of God, why is it that so many of the people who have those Christian fish symbols also have those bumper stickers that joke about killing people who drive too closely or offering to give up their guns once their hands are cold and dead? And why has this damn thing turned into a bad Andy Rooney column?

To be fair, my scooter is littered with Tar Heel propaganda, and it also has several other stickers, one promoting a microbrewery and two others promoting The Rescues and Cheap Trick, 'cuz I think I'm gonna put any stickers I get at concerts on the scooter. But with a scooter, the rules change. Everyone laughs at a scooter. You notice them, and you chuckle. So at that point, what dignity do I have left anyway? Might as well decorate the thing with amusing little details.

But that Honda Odyssey? That Land Cruiser? Those are just two more large vehicles puttering down the runway. No one cares, and no one wants to care. So your little family stickers start looking a sadly desperate, like a 49-year-old cougar who wears too much makeup and no panties.

Now, if a dude or dudette drove a Ferrari and had family stickers on the back of that bad boy? Totally acceptable.

The Fruits of Freedom

Your Stripes - Buffalo Tom (mp3)
Liar - Tonic (mp3)

Freedom is a Lie.

Freedom with a capital F, the notion that a human being is free, means having the ability and choice to lie, to deceive, to subvert. In other words:

Freedom = Deception

While I'm sure this is an entirely unoriginal idea, it came to me most recently while listening to an NPR Morning Edition story on women in Basra struggling for freedom under the oppressive shackles of their culture, especially prior to the American insurgence.

One woman confesses to going home at night and putting on makeup, then washing it off before leaving her home the next morning. "It allowed her, she says, to feel more feminine in the confines of her home," the reporter says.

Presently, in a more liberated Iraq with her increased freedom, she is described as follows: "She's dressed in a white jacket and a form-fitting purple satin skirt. Her toenails are painted with silver glitter. Her makeup looks like it was applied with the giddiness of a teenager. Still, she's afraid."

Now, read carefully this Iraqi woman's comments to the reporter, as she's made up like a teenager and trying to mimic Carrie Bradshaw. Everytime I hear it or read it, it knocks my head sideways: "The civility is temporary. The problems in Basra won't end because all we do is cover these problems up. They do not attack the cause."

My wife manages our church's very successful summer camp. Two days ago, she was hemming and hawing about one of her 17-year-old counselors who wears these mammoth diamond earrings. She didn't think it was appropriate for him to wear them while shepherding around kids at a summer church camp, but she didn't want to "infringe on his freedom."

Iraqi women equate Freedom with makeup and fashion?
Teens equate Freedom with earrings and tattoos?

Have I gone mad?! Are Amigos falling from the sky??

Perhaps it will betray my own desperate need to come across as high-minded and intellectual (although quoting The Three Amigos prolly shoots that goal in the proverbial foot), but when the hell did satin skirts and tats become symbols of the Freedom for which we are willing to send our soldiers in harm's way to protect? Why do we insist on equating individuality and freedom of expression with what goes in and out of our nostrils?

And can I express how troubling it is that Iraqi women seem to have managed to catch up to our superficial obsessions in the blink of an eye? If Freedom was Mel Gibson, they apparently skipped the Braveheart stage and went right into What Women Want.

These thoughts were giving me mental indigestion, so I continued processing.

One of my biggest personal pet peeves is the equating of freedom and individuality with permanent splotches of ink in our flesh, piercings of one sort or another, or even clothing items. I look at these people, modestly intelligent younger folks who have permanently altered their flesh so they could "express themselves," and wonder, Couldn't you just write something?

Others need to free themselves with surgery. Bigger chest. Bigger dick. Different reproductive organs (that don't reproduce). Bigger lips. Fake muscles. Smaller stomach. These people feel imprisoned in their own bodies and are convinced that doing one thing or another to alter their appearance means personal Freedom.

Hell, who am I to say they're wrong? Maybe doing this stuff really does free them.

There's a new movie coming out about people who fantasize and fetishize the notion of being crippled. They get off by riding in wheelchairs and wearing leg braces and scheme about permanently disabling themselves. I chuckle thinking about women with fake tits and Botox and fake lips watching the trailer and having this conversaition:

"Wow, those people are messed up."
"What kind of messed up person gets turned on thinking about being crippled?" "Seriously."
"So, when's the next time you inject botchulism toxin into your face?"
"Next Tuesday. Can't wait. My eyes are looking so crinkly and old, I can't even look in the mirror. When's your lap-band appointment?"
"Two weeks. Can't wait. Once that's done, and now that my tits are huge and firm, I'm gonna be the hot slut my husband has been fantasizing about."

Our screwed-up notion of Freedom actually goes back to the mythological (or not) Garden of Eden, where our two protagonists bit that damn fruit just so they could feel Free. We claim the serpent deceived them, but did it? It might not have told them the whole truth, but it didn't lie.

Until A&E bit in, they didn't really understand right from wrong. They didn't really understand sin. They were like infants, morally. They had two simple rules. That's it. (1) Don't Eat That, and (2) Don't Eat This. They did what they were told and never thought much else about it, kind of like vacuum cleaners or weather vanes. But after they ate, they were suddenly aware of the notions of deception, of lies. ("The serpent deceived us!")

Yes, they were Free.

And what's the very first thing they do? Cover themselves. Adam & Eve were the planet's first fashionistas. The fruit made them aware of their own imperfections. I'd bet a thousand bucks that Eve immediately started smearing various berries on her face, thus inventing rouge and lipstick as well. Then come Cain & Abel and their immortal tale of murderous envy. Cain wants to Keep Up with the Joneses so badly he kills for it.

Deception. Fashion. Envy. These are the first first-fruits of Freedom.

And here's what rankles me. Whether I like it, whether my higher mind accepts it, whether it annoys me, we cannot have Big Freedom without Insignificant Freedom. Iraqi women can hardly start to grasp equal rights if they can't even wear pants. Most teenagers don't even know what a "fireside chat" is, so maybe they need to equate Freedom with that treasure trail tattoo before they can grasp Guantanamo Bay and rendition.

We must crawl before we can walk. Sometimes we must crawl because we're in a small space or someone Jeff Gillooly'd our leg. I am wrong to agonize about people fixating on the superficial Freedoms if I truly hope that they might one day appreciate or concern themselves with the larger ones.

Therefore, I raise my drinking glass -- albeit with shaky and uncertain hand -- to this wonderful bastion of Freedom:


I'll try to only throw up in my mouth as opposed to all over someone.

"Your Stripes" is off Buffalo Tom's third album, Sleepy-Eyed. "Liar" is off Tonic's third album, Head On Straight. Both are available on iTunes, although I personally recommend purchasing each band for selective songs rather than entire albums at a time.

iRorschach: The Game Show

All In All - My Friend Steve (mp3)

Common People - William Shatner (mp3)

"You sure do love your whiners." -- One of my oldest and most trustworthy friends in the whole world has said this in regards to my musical preferences.

In my previous post, I asked the following question: Do the characters with whom we identify shape who we become, or do we simply identify with whom are destined to be?

Megan G. is slightly overweight -- maybe "big-boned" -- and had hair bordering on black. It wasn't naturally that color. If she didn't dye it, her hair would be what my mother lovingly describes as "chicken-s#!t brown." She streaks it every month or so, mostly pink, but occasionally lavender or blue to mix it up and remind everyone of her originality. She'd like to convince you that her weight and her hair aren't the two most important things to know about her, but in the back of her mind, she kinda fears that they are.

Megan was mostly in the loop in her middle school years but started to fall out of the center of things by high school. Maybe she had some serious acne problems. Possibly she had a bad experience with a boy while out with a group and drinking, possibly experimenting with drugs. Whatever the case, although she held onto her love of that cheesy music she adored in her younger years -- "Forever Your Girl" and "I Saw the Sign" -- by the time she got to high school, her musical tastes got angry and aggressive. Lords of Acid and Limp Bizkit, Rob Zombie and Sevendust, and plenty of Drowning Pool thrown in for good measure.

Her family was middle-class, and only to the degree that I can claim to be 6-feet tall even though I'm only 5'10". Her dad, who left when she was still that happy middle school kid, got Megan an iPod Nano for her 17th birthday. Megan wasn't all that obsessed with music. She enjoyed listening to it, but mostly as an afterthought or to stave off boredom, not because she constantly hungered to experience it.

She hated high school. Hated. It. It was everything that's wrong with this country, wrong with this world, from adults who only show up to get paid to peers who only show up to get laid. Everything about high school boiled down to sex, which only served to constantly remind her that she wasn't all that physically appealing. And being reminded of it only served to start her down the vicious cycle of bitterness and pasty-white pudginess.

Megan got her first tattoo at the end of her second semester at Chatt. State. She got more attention and comments from classmates about that one goddamn tattoo than she'd gotten about anything in, like, her whole life. She had three more by the end of August. But just like any fix, the return on investment went downhill quickly, so that fourth one was her last.

In late October, she traded her Nano at McKay's. She had bought an iPod Touch with the money she'd saved up working 30 hours a week while taking classes at Chattanooga State. The purchase was more of an impulsive, rebellious act than anything. She was sick of seeing others around her buying shit they couldn't afford, and she wanted to know what it felt like.

* * * * *

When my wife told me she wanted an iPod Nano for Christmas last year, I went out and got her a used one at the local Used Pop Culture Valhalla we call McKay's. When I got it home, I discovered it still had the previous owner's collection of 400 some-odd songs.

Of those 400, a quarter of the songs were by three artists: Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and Nirvana. Although these pointed to a male owner, I'd bet the farm the previous owner was female. She had 10 Tori Amos songs from two different albums. She also had "Ice, Ice Baby," and a healthy portion of Ace of Base and Paula Abdul.

Of the two males I have ever known who owned more than one Tori Amos album, both were gay, and neither would have been caught dead listening to Marilyn Manson.

With just her iPod Nano -- named "Megan" -- I constructed a rudimentary psychological profile of this former owner. My creation kinda depressed me. So I returned the iPod Nano to McKay's 10 days after Christmas and got my wife a refurbished one, a green beauty exorcised of all previous-owner's musical demons.

But I kept 100 or so of Megan's songs. Can't really explain why. But Marilyn Manson's version of "Tainted Love" and Limp Bizkit's version of "Faith" both should be nominated for "Worst Cover Songs Ever" consideration.

* * * * *

There should be a new game show where 10 people hand over their iPods, and the first 100 songs that play on their SHUFFLE are listed off. Two contestants would face off to try and match up the playlist with the 10-person panel. Each person on the panel would give a 1-minute bio about themselves, including the crucial stats -- age, marital status, hometown, current town, etc. It would be a mix between "What's My Line?" and that Penn Jillette gameshow "Identity."

Then again, I'm not sure I want to know the biography someone would predict for me based on the if someone looked at the first 100 songs that emerged from my SHUFFLE.

"You sure do love your whiners..."

"All in All" by My Friend Steve is the whiniest of all the whiny songs I've ever loved. "Common People" by William Shatner w/Joe Jackson is the most kickass song ever recorded by an over-the-top melodramatic actor slash icon. The former can only be purchased on their used CD, "Hope and Wait." The latter is worth every penny to buy it on iTunes.