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2001-05-17 | 5:16 p.m.

Was talking to my friend Kiki at the park yesterday about body piercing and tattoos. I told her that I had told the girls I hoped they didn't get tongue piercings because, well, they hurt. Kiki said she doesn't want her kids to get piercings, because they're permanent metal additions (at this point she did a kind of hissy shudder) but she doesn't mind if they're covered in tattoos. I tend to lean the other way, figuring that most any piercing can be defeated by a pair of wire cutters, whereas a tattoo survives anything but expensive laser treatment. I told her by the time they are grown, piercings will be passe, and all the kids will be into scarification or worse.

Kiki has three or four tattoos, maybe more, including a couple on her feet. I asked her how much a tattoo really hurts, on the pain scale. Did it hurt as much as, say, getting your teeth root-planed? She didn't know what that was like, so I explained from experience that it's when they clean your teeth---vigorously---below the gumline. She made a joking reference to childbirth and I said "Surely it doesn't hurt that much." I asked her if people make noise while getting tattoos. You know, groans, yelps, that sort of thing. She said yes, but it depends on the person. "Do you make a lot of noise during sex?" she asked. "I don't know," I said. I made the wobbly hand gesture that means kinda-sorta. "I have three kids, you know. I can't remember." She laughed. Kiki lives with her two kids in an old cottage the size of my ass, so she knew what I meant. I gathered that her own sexual encounters take place in motels. She said she gets a lot of "Shhh!" but she tells them, "It's a motel. This is what it's here for."

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