I remember, back in the 1990s, watching an interview with Art Alexakis of the band Everclear. He was talking about a fan who came up to him, pulled his shirt off and showed him that he got the band’s name tattooed on his chest. Alexakis, while flattered, was perplexed at a fan’s choice to make something as ephemeral as a favorite rock band so dang permanent. “What if we totally suck in a couple of years?” he said.
I think like that about most tattoo ideas I’ve ever had. I think of what stuff I liked in, say, 1997 and how it would look pretty bad in 2015. And how what I dig in 2015 may seem ridiculous to me in 2030. People I know with tattoos don’t have issues like that because they — quite healthily, I believe — think of tattoos as reminders of where they were at that time in their lives more than some permanent statement of taste. I wish I was more chill about stuff like that, but I’m not. We all have hangups. And, as a result of my hangups, I don’t have any tattoos. Well, that and the fact that I have freckles on my arms and that would look weird.
Anyway, there’s someone in Canada who does not have such hangups. At least not about Jose Bautista and the 2015 Blue Jays. While it’s quite unlikely that Bautista will one day find himself in prison for, I dunno, regicide or another serious crime, there’s always the possibility that having a tattoo of any fallible human being will come back to haunt a guy.
Or, maybe, he got just as caught up in the moment as Bautista did and didn’t care who thinks a damn thing about it: