Marked Man

Some time not so long ago, I made some remark online about how needless it seemed to get tattoos or piercings. The reason was that it seems to me life tends to make its mark on you anyway, and so it's senseless to spend money making it happen. I'm still a young man, and have not been incredibly active in life for very long, but I have nonetheless managed to get my share of distinguishing, disfiguring marks. There's nothing too gruesome, but there are a few things there.

The key, I think, is to ensure that you have a good story to go along with a scar. "I burned myself cooking bacon without a shirt on" is not a good story at all. It's a horrible, humiliating way of explaining what the resulting scar is. You have to make up something better when it's a thing like that, or at least claim that you don't remember it even happening. That sound pretty good, because then people marvel at the live you lead that prevents you from being sure of how that scar happened.

I have gotten one or two marks that were of an embarrassing origin. I was glad to see them fade away. I also have had some whose genesis I could not explain, and I was all right with those disappearing. I was eager for the scar on my forehead to suddenly be popular with the advent of Harry Potter, but that didn't happen. Mostly people don't notice it, I think. That was the closest I have come to a cool scar with a cool story, which may be a myth now that I think about it.

Overall there has been some wear and tear that is all right. I've let myself get sunburned too many times, and that's probably evident. I've got roughly equal proportions of worry lines and laugh lines, the latter of which I don't regret acquiring. Actually, a lot of the worry lines are actually more from deep though, and those are fine. Still, I'd love to get one awesome scar in an out-of-the-way spot from preventing a bar robbery, or something like that.