On March 2nd, about exactly a year after I took off for New Zealand, I hitched a streetcar over to Kensington and got some Dwarven runes carved into my leg. They mean “decide,” or something close enough to it; I fooled around on the internet with various rune generators for about ten minutes a year ago this past February, until I ended up with something that looked like something I’d want permanently scribed on my flesh. It’s a bit like that episode of LOST that everybody hates except me – the one where what matters is what Jack’s tattoo means, not what it says. When dealing in made-up languages and the trade of black ink against one’s own very limited skin, what it means is pretty much the whole thing.
What a thing means is pretty much the whole thing across the board, really. The original thought for the tattoo was to have the line, “All that you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you,” written out in its entirety in Elvish somewhere on my body. That line is as close to the meaning of life as I think I’m likely to come in whatever time I have left, and it looks pretty nice all scrolled out, but it would have been long enough to start at my ankle and end up uncomfortably close to my balls, which wasn’t really optimal. And – again in the original conception – this tattoo was going to be acquired on the fly on my last day in New Zealand, before flying out of Auckland, so brevity had added value. Plus, The Hobbit had just come out a month or two before we went down there, and dwarves were sort of the unofficial mascots of our trip. And in the Kili/Tauriel romance scheme of things, I’m clearly the dwarf, because she’s clearly the elf. So the tattoo got hacked down to “decide,” which is the keyword anyway; and dwarvish runes, because they’re short, blunt, and as solid as the mountain rock beneath our feet.
Auckland didn’t work out, tattoo-wise. Neither Dave nor Demetre was interested in a communal scribing (though Dave would have gotten some piercings, had the timing worked out), so my backwater scheme to go all Fellowship on this thing fell apart like dinner plans in Napier. So instead I did a walk-in appointment at the Pearl Harbor Gift Shop on the one-year anniversary of my flight, largely because somehow, in the entirety of the last year, I neither worked up the coordination nor the gumption to a) get the tattoo or b) book an effing appointment to get the tattoo. So I stood outside Pearl Harbor for an hour and change on a beautifully clear, -12 degree Sunday morning in Toronto, and thought about addiction recovery and depression. And you lot, of course. I think about you lot a lot.
The thing is, our lives are a story we keep telling ourselves. And, blog notwithstanding, I’m faintly terrible at telling myself my own story, or at least, I’m terrible at doing it when things aren’t working out. My life basically falls into two available categories in my self-description: “awesome” and “awful,” which doesn’t help anything, I assure you. “Awesome” definitely started last March or thereabouts, and kept going for a good long while; there was some horrible shit in there too, but it didn’t capsize the boat. I figured out a lot of things that were long, long, looooooong overdue figuring out. (And anyone who’s been to my tumblr in the last 10 months can sort out the rest.)
“Awesome” started because I made some decisions about what to do with the time that was given to me, the most trivial and yet ultimately most revelatory being the decision to spend four grand to fly to the other side of the planet and eat a metric fuckload of meat pies. I mean, I wasn’t in that goddamned wonderland 48 hours before I’d solved the whole thing. I was sitting on a hill way above and behind the observation building at Bob’s Peak, and I had my fleece on and my hood up, and I spoke some words to the close and holy darkness, and it was done. Everything that happened after that day – and I do mean everything, from standing in the most beautiful place I’d ever been, to looking at the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen – fell out of those five or ten minutes. All that we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
So I’m standing outside Pearl Harbor last Sunday freezing my toesies off, and I’m thinking to myself that when life takes a downturn, as it inevitably, inextricably, fundamentally must, I might do myself a favour and not connect all the pieces together into a whole-state assessment of “awful.” Guys, the last year was the best year of my life. Every second of it. That’s a scary thought in itself because let’s face it, everyone has a best year of their life, and once it’s done, it’s done. I sincerely hope last year was the best year of my life so far, but who knows. But that raised another important point, standing outside in the cold – seriously, this was a very useful hour outside – which is simply, “what the fuck do I know?” Not a thing. Never have, never will. I pride myself on my ability to suss out what’s going to happen, and in a few tragic occasions, I’ve been disturbingly accurate. But I don’t really know anything. We each have our portion of time. We don’t know how long it is, or how it will go. We only get to decide how to use it.
The walk-in process at Pearl Harbor is lovely, by the way, if you get there early enough. My tattoo artist took my runes and made my stencil and had me stand up on the tattoo bed so she could position it “just so,” although “just so” isn’t really the idea for this tattoo, as you probably gathered from mylaissez-faire attitude towards the Dwarvish language above. Because tattoos tend to go on one’s body permanently, I think there’s something very important about not aiming for anything resembling “perfect.” Skin isn’t perfect – and holy lord, do I love every single imperfection upon a person’s skin, down to the last long, stringy scar – and if you let yourself get overwhelmed by the permanence of the whole thing, you’ll never get anywhere in life. That’s what the tattoos have always meant to me. It’s my life, my body, my skin, and I’m making a change, and it won’t be perfect, but it’ll be there. It means what it means to me. I made a decision.
My tattoo artist got to carving away, and holy fuck this one hurt a lot more than the last one. As with last time, thinking about oral sex helped. And I was up and done in a ridiculously short amount of time, given all the time I have left to enjoy the resulting work. I limped up to Sanagan’s, and had the best meat pie I’ve had in just shy of a year. And I volleyed a beautiful storm of texts back and forth with the impossible girl; and told Dave and Demetre that the meat pies were real and I had eaten one; and then I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and was off home.
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