Bust my chops no more.

Buz Murdock: [Buz is driving the Corvette alongside of Arline who is walking on the side of a road]

Look, I want you to know that no matter what it looks like, it’s not a pick up. The good people need to dig each other right now or forget it. Two half-truths never made an integrated single, but two truths together, man, that’s a crazy square root.

~Route 66 (TV series).

“I want to decorate my body with images that make me feel good when I look into the mirror at myself. A favorite uncle of mine who disagrees with my tattoos likes to say that the body is the temple. I reply that my tattoos are the stained glass of my temple.”

– Pg. 36 This is Who I am our beauty in all shapes and sizes. Rosanne Olson.

I’ve had a productive day with Wikipedia. I love to edit by adding facts to pages found. Most of it pertained to Los Angeles Flipside Fanzine. It is a bummer when I come across semi-Flipside people who are so critical of what I did or am doing.

Three guys that always seem to have to insult me and bring me down. I hardly know them and did not spend much time with them if not at all. One says I am full of shit. And told me things about my life that are false and lies.

Who is this person? Was he in bed with me? Did he eat with me? How does he know more about my life than I do? The last criticism from one is that I am a “commie.” He also said something about my tattoos as if to humiliate me.

I do not know where all his resentments come from, but it must be some sort of macho thing. All three like to bust my chops.

Got me thinking about Tattoos though. So out of all their bull it got a little story to boot up. I like to turn bullshit into something beautiful.

The first tattoo that made an impression on me was a little one.

It was in the 1960s when my oldest brother served in the navy reserve. He came home with a pair of dice on his left ankle. The whole house was in an uproar about it. I kept wanting to take them off and throw them.

Next when English bands started to tour in the early 1980s, I noticed many of the band members with a few tattoos here and there. Big Frank from Whittier started to get a lot of them. He worked for the promoter Goldenvoice. I liked his tattoos as well. It was not until the mid-1980s that I got my first one.

“The members of the band ASF were nice women. We did not get the pleasure of seeing them play live when they came to visit us that summer, yet I was thrilled in their travels that they decided to give us a visit. I got my first tattoo with Leslie and Tracy.

It was of an image I drew a lot in Flipside of a dancing stick person with wild hair. I got it on my right upper arm. Tracy got a parrot on her right forearm.

Leslie got a tribal tattoo on her head. At the time, she had a long Mohawk that she wore down on the side. The tattoo parlor was a good dive located in Anaheim a block down from Disneyland. It really was a blast.

The tattoo artist was a young guy I knew from the scene.

As I was getting my tattoo, one of the more seasoned artists walked by and said to us,

“Hey kid, you are doing your first tattoo?”

Then he looked at me and said in a roguish voice,

“Ya, you are getting his first!”

I have forgotten the bleached blond artist’s name. I do remember his pierced tongue which made a constant clicking sound as he pierced my skin. The last part of inking he did, to the two dancing stick figures with wild hair tattoos, were their eyes.

He softly told me, “The eyes contain the soul of each figure!”

~ Excerpt from My Punkalullaby, The Seminary of Praying Mantis.

Around 2009 to 2015 life started to change. Going through menopause and having both parents die was a lot to go through. My husband and I started to go out at night. The kids were old enough to stay home.

We went to Mr. T’s Bowl and a local Pub named the Scotland Yard a lot. Fun times. We made a lot of friends and listened to some great music/ Bands and DJs helped me. A couple of the bartenders, we called them toxicologists, had some nice-looking tattoos.

I met up with a local artist and went to a local parlor to start getting tattoos. It was a ritual for me. It was like the tattoos appeared on me before having them inked in. It was wild. Along with drinking, smoking, and driving too fast I felt much better.

My tattoos tell a story of becoming a crone. My last two tattoos are a rendering of Dionysus Hollyhocks in my garden. In fact, they are back again growing right now outside my window.