notes from underground

Surely just about everyone these days has seen tattoos of Chinese characters.  I imagine the people who have them are attempting to access mystical, exotic, foreign energies by having these done or of course even more stupid, “Oh, what pretty designs.”   I don’t really have any morals and think of myself akin to The Marquis de Sade in his writings about the complete and utter lack of morality.  Of course this doesn’t mean I go around raping, murdering, pillaging which for some reason or another I don’t think I could develop the impetus to do so and probably am too lazy; although, as a side note, I wouldn’t mind tossing a nuke down the throat of Hollywood and running for cover. Nevertheless, despite my complete lack of a moral compass, there is a few things that are serious no no’s.  What this girl did in the picture above is one of them.  One day a while back I was sitting with a Chinese man, from China, at the local gym, and as we were talking several people with Chinese character tattoos walked by.  My Chinese acquaintance asked what I thought about the Chinese character tattoos and I said they were absolutely ridiculous and he was in entire agreement and of course the whole point was that he wanted to point out how ridiculous it was and I am sure many many Chinese people feel this way.  I speak one other language besides English: Spanish, and I definitely don’t even feel comfortable doing this- it just isn’t quite right-  not that I am pro-American, or proud of my historical heritage and culture, or patriotic, which I am none of these.  From what I hear many people translate names or sayings from English to Chinese for their tattoo, which is just a serious faux paux.  How could one represent themselves with another culture like this that they obviously have no ties with a deep and meaningful connection? These people might as well write China on their forehead to go along with just about every other thing around that has the word China on it.  Even better, I would love to sponsor trips for people with these tattoos and pay for them to travel to China and watch all of the Chinese people laugh and make fun of them.  Despite the unlikeliness of my two day dreams of spite becoming a reality, I still have the consolation of being entertained by the people running around with Chinese character tattoos which is basically the equivalent of the little signs that were taped on an unsuspecting victims back in grade school with “loser” or “stupid head” written on it that gave everyone a good laugh while the victim had no idea what was going on.  I have to agree the aesthetic qualities of the Chinese written language is far superior to English characters (although I have to mention the calligraphy on the US constitution with the very beautiful and exotic cursive writing is quite spectacular), but the ideas expressed in both languages or any language really is the same.  It is strange how generally the mainstream masses of people are shallow, read celebrity magazine, and in short are rather airheads are the same people who would probably have a Chinese character tattoo that represents some deep, profound, spiritual, philosophical, mystical, exotic part of their lives.  May God strike you down if you have Chinese character tattoo and you are not supposed to.