Tattoo Addiction - Peace at the End of the Needle

   I have a couple tattoos myself, three actually. One on each forearm and one on
my left shoulder.  I’ve heard people, and you know the ones I’m talking about,
that just can’t figure out “why someone would do THAT to their body”.  It’s okay
if you don’t understand the reason, but I’ll bet you have some way of getting to
the same place. 

   What place? Silence. People who are “addicted” to tattoos, aren’t really
“addicted”, per se.  Some fall in love with the expression of art, which tattooing
absolutely IS, art that is.  If you don’t think so, take a needle and try to paint a
football sometime, we’ll see how you do. A good tattoo artist is a Picasso of a
Living Canvas. Ok, enough digression on that one. Back to the “Silence”.

   When you get a tattoo, it hurts.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is absolutely
full of shit.  The level of pain depends on the artist, how deep they go, the size of
the tattoo, color versus outline, and, of course, your personal level of tolerance
to pain.

   Here’s where it gets interesting. Any time your body undergoes pain for an
extended period of time, it secretes endorphins to overcome that pain. The same
thing happens to chile-heads when we (yes I’m one too, thank god!) get some
Red Savina Habanero that is particularly Fresh, to workout “fanatics” when they
get to the point of “Train Through the Pain”, or to the accident victim who
somehow finds the strength to push himself out from under a 2,000 pound vehicle
that has been sitting on his leg.  Or how about the gentleman who was hiking,
got his hand caught under, or between, I forget, a rock, took his own pocket
knife and cut off his own hand to survive! We teach in Martial Arts that, when you
are subduing an attacker with a painful jointlock, to put on pressure to gain
compliance, and then let off ever so slightly. Then, if the would-have-been
attacker tries to move, you reapply the force again. What you DON’T do is keep
the pressure on the whole time, because his body will release endorphins, and he
will eventually overcome the pain, and THEN you’re in trouble.

   And now for the moral of the story, since we’ve explained what happens when
the body experiences pain, and how the brain/mind compensates. Now for what
happens in the mind itself.  When endorphins are released, the mind, for some
reason, becomes very quiet, very focused.  All of the static, the noise, all of the
external stimulation that is so fkn rampant in our society, it all goes away, and
there you are, left in tranquil peace, at least for a time.  I’d be willing to bet it’s
the same reason that people smoke, drink, do drugs, etc. Make sense?  Thought
so.

   And here’s something really disturbing: I was watching a show one time about
serial killers, and how a psychologist was trying to figure out what makes them
tick.  He was interviewing this one guy, and I forget his name at the moment, and
this guy was telling the psychologist why he thought he “did it”.  He said he did it
for the rush, no other reason. He said that when he killed someone, it felt like
glass was shattering all inside his head, and then got quiet.  He thought that he
had to kill people in order to get that feeling, that silence after the shattering
glass.

   Now I’m certainly not trying to equate the behavior of a serial killer to someone
getting a butterfly tatoo on their ass, or smoking a cigarette, or drinking a beer,
or even taking a Major Bong Hit (HEY LEAVE MICHAEL ALONE, HE DESERVED
A BREAK!!!! LOL), but what I am saying is that we all seek that Silence in some
fashion or another, through whatever vehicle we have available to us, and I guess
it would stand to reason that the more we crave that Silence, the more extreme
the measure we will go to to get it.

   Now for a bit of shameless self-promotion, although it will be for Your benefit,
so I guess it’s still shameless without being “self” here. There are a couple of
sections in the book that deal pretty directly with the state of mind I’ve talked
about here.  And YES, the book is still $10, so head over and pick up a copy, huh?

Till Next Time,
Paul.

                                           Get the book at YFUATIW.COM