Yaddada yaddada Body Art and Other Obscenities In this case, beauty is in the eye of the tasteless. Last updated 07/05

Shortly before we parted company for the last time, I got an ex-girlfriend to take a few beefcake pics. I'm glad I did...I'll never look this good again, and the shots I got turned out very well indeed.

Is this really me? Hell yes. Well...more or less...the "less" is obviously a neat bit of Photoshop phun. And as I'll explain in a moment, it has had some...er...rather unintended consequences.

I don't apologize for the creamy-white complexion or the rail-thin physique. I've spent years working on this moontan...do you have any idea how long it takes to completely get rid of shorts-and-t-shirt lines, or how expensive SPF100 sunscreen is? And for those of you who may not fully appreciate the body-sculpting here, I'll only say that it takes a lot of coding-and-HTML marathons, and a veritable swimming pool full of diet soda to achieve this elegant combination of lack of muscle tone and morbid underweight.

For what it is, I don't think it's a bad shot. You should hope you look as good at 45, and in all honesty, I did like it as a bit of show-off-ery. But I didn't expect it to become the mini-phenomenon it became in late 2005. Suddenly it began appearing in blogs, webmags and messageboards, and I've been told it was even copied for a collage used for a CD cover in Germany. I actually did this as a lark, just to see if I could produce a usable nude shot that couldn't be considered pornographic. I didn't expect to become a poster boy for gay bottoms! Oh...one other small point: the crotch is, of course, heavily edited. But the right nipple wasn't airbrushed out...I simply don't have one. It's part of a birth defect that caused my entire right side to be underdeveloped.

Do I really understand what I'm doing here? Hell, yes...but seriously, with all the calendar posing going on these days, who fucking cares? I seriously doubt that this will ever affect my future employability. ("And now, speaking on the future of codependency treatment paradigms, here's author, comedian, Internet porn icon, political commen...ah...er, Dorothy, did I get the right introduction here?")

Some obscure wit (me) once said about tattoos, "There are the scars we get, and then there are the scars we choose." Tattoos and piercings are, of course, among the scars we choose. When they aren't simply done as permanent body art, nearly all tattoos tend to be "chosen" for pretty much the same two reasons: either to glorify an event, sentiment or circumstance that we have no intention of grieving fully and leaving behind, or to express a desire, loss or lack that we know is beyond our reach.

I've been thinking about a tattoo for some twenty years now, in fact ever since I penned the infamous short story Lakehead Incident early in my twenties (possibly still linked in my music section). I didn't actually get this tattoo until my early forties. It commemorates a music career that never was, and to make a long story short, the reason why I didn't get this tattoo earlier was because I simply wasn't able to accept that a music career was beyond my reach.

I have to admit that it's been fun having a tattoo that I really can't properly display to strangers without either poking my fist in their face or giving them the floorward finger. I have had two other tattoos planned for many years, but both of them are fairly intricate custom designs, and I haven't found a tattooist in my area who gives me enough confidence that I'd contract them for body art.