We all judge, every moment. Those who say they do not are either not aware that they do or lying. We are predispositioned to do so.

It was 2009, I think, when I went to The Cazbah, a San Diego concert venue, to hear a local So Cal band, The Farmers (formerly known as The Beat Farmers). It just so happened that the occasion coincided with a kind of industry convention of tattoo artists and their customers. I had never seen so much ink in one place. While the band was taking a break I got into a conversation with a young woman named Dana. She had a tattoo of a three-masted, square-rigged sailing ship high on her chest, just below her neck line. I asked her where she was from, and she said she had lived in Southern California her whole life. I asked her if she was familiar with the town of Dana Point. She said she was. I asked her if she had ever read "Two Years Before the Mast," by Richard Henry Dana. (Dana chronicled his trip aboard the kind of ship indelibly represented on this woman's body, from the east coast of the USA, around Cape Horn, to San Francisco, with a load of consumer goods and passengers. It's a classic of American literature and California history). She had not read the book and did not know that Dana Point was named for the author. (At Dana Point and a few other places along the coast, the ship stopped to take on its cargo for the return voyage: untanned cow hides, the raw material to make shoes, belts, harnesses...all types of leather goods. The hides were dried flat, stiff as a board, and very smelly. They were tossed off of the cliffs, wafting down to the beach where they were loaded into boats and rowed out to the ship at anchor just off shore.) My curiosity was piqued; I had to ask (after all, her name was Dana!): "If you don't know about Richard Henry Dana and his famous voyage, then what inspired you to get a tattoo of a square-rigged sailing ship?"
"I just liked it," was her reply.

The only other conversation I recall from that night was with the sumptuously tattooed son of the head of the San Bernardino chapter of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang. We talked a little politics, and he kept referring to Barak Obama as "your black boy." Having read Hunter S. Thompson's "Hell's Angels" years before, I did not disagree too strenuously. I did not really feel like being stabbed, shot, or stomped to death that night.

That is very well put but I generally do not favor tattoos or piercings. My 2 daughters have plenty of them and my former work boss did too. She was one of the best bosses I ever had.

Very well put there!! There will always be those who insist on judging a book by its cover. Growing up I was often told that ‘appearance means everything’ and I will agree to a small extent. But if you let it get in the way of being who you are is how you get trapped into conformity.

Words of wisdom and despair

You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to be here and whether you can hear it or not, the universe is laughing behind your back.