journal features

back-to-school special on tattoos

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2011.09.06

I passed a shop advertising "sizzling back-to-school deals!" It was a tattoo shop.

I guess it makes sense, in a way. If you can get the customers while they're still flush with cash from their summer jobs, their parents hand-outs, and their student loans .. why wouldn't you?

Speaking of back-to-school, today is the first day of school in Ontario and as it happens I was returning a rental car during what has to be one of the most congested days of the year. It's one day that sees all of the parents changing their routines, all of the school buses returning, and the re-introduction of crossing guards. It took me forty-five minutes to drive about seven kilometers.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)