This will be the amazing 15 minute rant, not least of all because it'll be a fucking miracle if I manage to limit myself to only 15 minutes of spouting.

I have no preset topic this week, so I'm gonna take aim at a random victim and see where it goes. Bear with me. Or try another site.

There's this strip mall near my house. It's a frightening little place with a Long's Drugs, a McDonalds, a 7-11, a JoAnn's Fabrics, and a bunch of the other totems of suburbia. There's been this empty spot there ever since I can remember that used to, about five years ago, be an Olan Mills.

So I was there the other day, and I noticed that the Olan Mills is now a tattoo shop called Mark of The Vampire. I have no idea who works there, what the place is like, or if there is intelligent life on earth. Basically, I ain't gettin' another tattoo for a while, and when I do, I already know who I'm gonna have do it.

My point is more along the lines of "Has body modification become trendy and mainstream enough that such a shop - which basically keeps the same business hours as the rest of the complex - going to actually survive there? I don't know.

But if it does, either the housewives who go to the other stores are getting funky when I'm not looking, or the whole bodymod idea has spread to all people.

Which would be cool. See, my belief is that body mods - of whatever kind, if you want to get a steel rod driven through your butt cheeks, go ahead - are a statement of ownership and a rejection of group-think. By modifying your appearance, you are affirming your ownership of your own body.

Which may, on the surface, sound silly. But think about it. We live in a culture - and don't get me started on society - where people have, whether they believe it or not, a very vested interest in how they look. Plastic surgery is hot. Stupid medical procedures are hot. If you don't fit the mold, do something about it. Life should be like that "Who Made Who" video by AC/DC, the one with all the clones.

So people who voluntarily make a commitment to change their appearance, be it through piercings, tattoos, implants of various kinds, whatever, have made a commitment to change society.

It's a rejection of the amazing belief about appearance that we are fed - and swallow, don't think I don't realize that - by Hollywood and the rest of the media, whether visual or print or whatever. It's a big deal that people have the greatest possible demographic appeal, which means nothing extreme being touted as beauty, the cranky bitch is always fat, the rebel has piercings, etcetera. By changing your own appearance - and, hopefully, committing enough to the process that you're not doing it to be cool and rebellious, you're rejecting the trappings of society.

I was watching a special on VH1 about the 1992 election and the role that MTV and Rock the Vote played in that process. They had some clips of each of the candidates that I found very interesting.

They had Bill Clinton rockin' out with his sax, and the inhale question, and just generally showing how hip he was. They also showed what looked like a press conference where Bush decried rap and thirteen year old pregnancies (to hear him, you'd'a thought that rappers get girls pregnant, apparently by osmosis, given the respective numbers of rappers and thirteen year olds), then saying that he didn't think that he was out of touch with the younger generation.

The point, to me, is that people are becoming aware of the bullshit, and that the bullshit that worked on boomers and other generations is no longer going to work on Gen. X and the younger generations.

This is not because Gen X'ers are such hot shit and smarter than the propaganda. No. It has to do with the fact that we have grown up with the propaganda and familiarity breeds contempt.

Which is where the body mod thing comes back into the picture. I believe that if you are committed to the concept - if you're the sort that ponders and draws your own tattoos rather than getting the flash off the walls - if you place thought in your mods, you are rejecting traditional notions of beauty and conformity. You are, in effect, saying that society's views are less important than expressing your own views.

I differentiate this from rebelling against society. You are still living in human society - at least if you're reading this you are - so you haven't just thrown it over and headed to the hills. Instead, you're changing the limits of what's acceptable and accepted by our society as we change.

Diversity is good. I'd like to wish that my generation could spend less time swallowing the bullshit of generations past - we all know McDonald's isn't good food, right? - and start formulating our own approaches.

I know this isn't actually likely to happen, nor is this article likely to start a grassroots movement of bodymodders.

But that's what I see in this incursion of a tattoo shop into the center of whitebread middle America. It's the wavefront of a new paradigm. It's saying that tattoos aren't just for the fringe anymore.

Maybe I will go get a tattoo. I'm enough of a cynic to believe that they'll be out of business in six months, tops, but I'm enough of an optimist to hope.

Okay, so that was my half-hour rant. And it wasn't about feminism or GW. Life is good.

Sticking a steel spike through my skull and calling it art,

Channon