Body over mind
Black Light Tattoos Are A Symbol Of The Increasing Stupidity Of Humans
We got all the coins but don’t know how to spend them.
My wife’s gay personal trainer friend Jason is yelling at me from our kitchen.
“Frank, Frank, I got some new ink,” he says.
It’s November 2022, and I tell him that I’m in the middle of watching a mildly significant world cup game known commonly as ‘the final’ between Argentina and France. Therefore, I couldn’t give less of a fuck about what stupid drawing he has gotten onto his ripped body.
But Jason doesn’t hear me. It’s like someone has stuffed party balloons into his perfectly toned ears.
I’m unsure why he thinks his bodily decorations are essential enough to ruin important events.
The last time I saw Jason, we were at a friend’s wedding, and he was walking around pulling up his shirt sleeve and showing everyone how he had tattooed his entire left arm black.
“Congratulations on your gangrene tattoo,” I had told him since his arm looked dead, like it was about to fall off. He had laughed a confusing laugh since people like Jason, who spend so much time on their bodies, do not, by default, have time to learn about things like gangrene.
I watched him from afar as he googled it. I saw his face turn to horror, and I’m sure it wasn’t because of the explicit images on Google. It was because he realised that his arm looked identical to theirs.
And now he is standing in my kitchen, interrupting the world cup final for his latest skin project.
“Hey Frank, Frank,” he says again.
“What the fuck, Mate?”
He wanders over and crouches between me and the screen — a move worthy of a swift punch in the gonads. Then he pulls up his shirt, revealing his well-ordered abs and pecs. He points at his left shoulder.
“Do you like it?” he says.
There is nothing there. It’s just fine young skin.
“There’s nothing there,” I say.
Jason starts wetting himself, laughing like an epileptic beaver.
“I know,” he says. “It’s a black light tattoo, so it only shows up under UV lights.”
“So what, you can only see it when you are in a sunbed in the eighties?” I ask.
“No, they have UV lights in lots of clubs.”
That’s when I remember the UV lights in nightclubs — the way they highlight the blemishes and freckles on your face — the way they light up your teeth and eyeballs and make even the most beautiful individual look like a luminous ugly prick.
“So Jason, you are saying that you are getting a tattoo to make yourself more attractive, but the only time people will see it is when you look like an ugly bastard under UV lights?”
Jason laughs the same confused laugh as he did at the wedding. He stands up, walks back into the kitchen, and I return to the game.
That night I sit in bed, watching videos of ex-racehorses playing Monopoly, and I weep cold tears for the generation of humans brought up entirely by the internet.
The internet initially seemed to be an excellent thing for young people.
Poor bastards like us, to that point, had relied on the ideologies of our parents and teachers for our education, so toxic legacies of racism, hatred and narrow-mindedness were passed down from generation to generation like the shitstick in the relay at the demonic Olympics.
As a pre-internet kid, I can tell you that many of those ideologies are still stuck in the back of my personality, like that last piece of dried beef jammed between your teef after Aunty Harriet’s compulsory Sunday roast.
And while I believe it’s far superior to build an ideology from one’s internet research rather than one’s parents and teachers, it still comes with challenges.
Initially, information on the internet was open and free of charge. Nowadays, the World Wide Web is mostly a vast market of shysters using AI and other damp, mouldy tools to get you to buy their shady wares.
And social media drives people into an isolated corner of their own ideologies that, in some ways, is worse than the indoctrination of parents and teachers since it has the additional poison of capitalist influence.
Just because our kids can research things now (a good thing) doesn’t mean that research will be effective.
And it can just as easily lead to a totally vain and self-obsessed child whose life goal is to be an influencer.
I feel that people like Jason are becoming increasingly common.
You can’t fucking go anywhere without seeing some wannabe TikTok schlep posing in a sheepskin bikini, sucking in their stomachs and inflating their lifeboat lips for the camera.
I heard that taking a phone off a child has become ‘cruel’ since it is now considered an essential part of their development. And I can’t help but think that the phone companies or the internet companies or just about every other company in the world that relies on phones for their business has started that damn rumour like Coca-Cola turned Santa Claus from fern green to menstrual red or how Hallmark created a special day where turnip-brained husbands stop gaslighting their wives and send them genetically modified chocolates instead.
We live in a world now where people will clap and whoop like you saved a child from drowning when you mention that you have lost ten kilograms — such is the degree that we have become obsessed with our bodies.
And now we have this alpha male culture where you have to:
- Practice Ju-Jitsu
- Eat elk phallus on quinoa toast for dinner
- Do testosterone replacement therapy (TRT)
- Tattoo the statue of liberty on your cock
- Pump iron like Scwarzeniver six times a week.
- Drink chalky seagull shit protein shakes for lunch
- Sit in a bollock-shrinking ice bath three times a week
- Sit in a foul, sweaty, disease-breeding, hellish sauna twice a week.
- Listen to a podcast about side hustles and have at least two side hustles.
- And, admit you’re a piss weak loser if you don’t breathe like Wim Hof and practice the Gary Vee sandpaper wank daily.
The world is shite. We all know that.
And even the wet flowers who still believe in positive thinking are starting to crumble around the edges. But people like Jason and the youth of tomorrow are forgetting about their brains and focusing so hard on their bodies and looks that they are leaving a door wide open for companies to come in and steal their damn sweaty souls.
And I’d like to announce that I just won’t let it happen.
Not on my watch
But, sadly, I will let it happen. We all will. Cos there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it except sit and nod when ripped, shaven-legged, motivated, dumb turkeyheads like Jason show us their gains.
We will keep just sitting there pretending that deep down we don’t all want smooth milkshake glutes like that and someone nice in our beds to touch them with their fingys.
We will dream privately of such things and instead keep sitting at the kitchen table, asking our significant others what we are having for dinner, doing wordle, and scrolling down our chosen newsfeeds one mile, then another and another.
Miles and miles of tiny ten-second snippets — each one, a burst of orgasmic braintertainment that makes you dumber, yet tells them one more thing about how you operate so they can make you dance like a capitalist turkey in ever more precise ways.
