Recently, my teenage daughter was complaining that she couldn’t find anything to watch on TV.
Not that there was nothing to watch. Quite the opposite. Between Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+, and probably some other subscription services I don’t even know I’m paying for, she had access to a gallery of entertainment that would have made the programmers at the Library of Congress cry like Fiona Apple on the rag.
And yet, there she was. Marooned on the couch with nothing but her Gen Z apathy to guide her. Scrolling through an infinite selection of movies and television shows, unable to find a single thing worth her TikTok attention span.
And for me, this was an opportunity to release the insufferable old man that’s been lurking inside of me since Whitney Houston was using Bolivian marching powder for the powers of good.
I pulled my pants up as high as they could go, and I told her a story about a time long ago, before the internet had conquered civilization and swallowed everything in its path. A time when, if you wanted to watch a movie in the comfort of your own home, you had to do something absolutely fucking crazy.
You had to leave the comfort of your own home.
You had to put on shoes.
You had to get in the car.
You had to drive to a physical location.
A magical place filled with wonder. With stoned couples in the heat of a Redvines vs Twizzlers battle.
A place called Blockbuster Video.
For those of you too wet behind the ears to remember, Blockbuster was basically Netflix with fluorescent lighting, industrial carpeting, and a late fee structure that occasionally required a second mortgage.
You walked through the automatic doors, past the candy display, and into an enormous room filled with VHS tapes. Rows and rows of movies, organized by genre, with the newest releases displayed proudly on the perimeter wall.
And you walked that wall.
With absolutely no idea what the fuck you were doing.
You’d start at one end, carefully inspecting cover art, reading the backs of boxes, occasionally pulling one off the shelf to make it look like you actually had an agenda.
Sometimes, you remembered the movie that was recommended to you 50 times and find it. Sometimes, you’d find absolutely nothing.
So you did what any rational person would do.
You walked the wall again.
In reverse.
As though reversing direction would somehow reveal an entirely different selection of films.
Only this time, you were prepared to lower your expectations enough to make something happen. Hopefully.
Maybe that romantic teen comedy where high school kids talk to each other like middle aged writers in therapy wasn’t so bad. Maybe the action movie starring the third-most-famous Baldwin brother had a decent explosions to tits ratio. Maybe the movie you’d rejected twenty minutes earlier had undergone some kind of miraculous transformation while you weren’t looking.
After all, you’re higher than the space station.
Eventually, you made a decision.
And here’s the part that induces disbelief.
You went home and watched the movie.
The whole thing.
If it was good. If it was bad. If it was amazing. If it was so bad it was good.
Because you’d driven across town, spent four dollars and ninety-nine cents, and committed yourself to the experience. Because you didn’t have a smart phone to stare at. There was no algorithm waiting to bail your sorry ass out. No infinite directory of alternatives available at the press of a button.
You picked something.
And you made it work.
I’m not suggesting we return to the days of rewinding tapes and paying six dollars because somebody left Con Air in the back of their Tercel hatchback with a Phish sticker on the bumper.
But I wonder if we lost something when we eliminated the necessity of making a decision.
We live in strange times. Times of unprecedented choice.
Every product can be researched. Every restaurant is Yelp reviewed. Every vacation optimized. We can compare hundreds of versions of essentially the same object, read the opinions of thousands of strangers, and spend an entire afternoon deciding which twelve-dollar phone charger represents the greatest possible return on our investment.
We’ve all become highly trained experts at researching decisions.
But when it comes to actually making them, we’re drooling on last year’s magazines in Darwin’s waiting room.
The internet has convinced us that the perfect option is out there somewhere. That if we scroll a little longer, dig a little deeper, or refine our search criteria one more time, we’ll eventually discover the thing that ticks every box.
That’s the problem with “perfect.”
And the more options we have, the more suspicious we become of the ones right in front of us.
There’s always something better.
Something more personal.
Something more us.
Something that’s gonna remind us of the good old days when we used to be happy.
Which brings me, of course, to tattooing.
One of the more interesting developments I’ve watched in this industry is the increasing expectation that every tattoo must be a bespoke and deeply validating expression of someone’s identity.
It should tell a story.
It should mean something.
It should incorporate eleven-teen different elements representing your dysfunctional family, your oppressive childhood, your star chart’s gatekeeping, your stunted journey of emotional maturity, and the dog you had when you were nine that the vet sent to heaven after it pissed on your moms sewing basket.
All rendered in an area approximately the size of a business card. On your ribs.
Listen, custom tattooing is bitchin as fuck. Collaborating with someone to turn an idea into something dope that they’re stoked to wear is a part of this job that I love.
But not every tattoo needs to be a commissioned autobiography.
It doesn’t always have to be the fucking Sistine Chapel.
Sometimes a dagger is just a cool looking knife.
Sometimes a panther just means “I’ll tune you up if you cross me because I’ve been martial arts training since I was eight years old and you get the three finger combo from Cains for lunch every day.”
And sometimes the best reason to get a tattoo is that you saw it, loved it, and wanted it.
Which is where flash comes in.
For most of tattooing’s modern history, flash was a fundamental part of the experience.
You walked into a shop and looked at the walls.
Paintings of eagles, roses, skulls, snakes, ships, hearts, and a thousand other images stared back at you. Some were traditional designs passed down through generations of tattooers. Others were original creations painted by the artists working in the shop.
You looked around until something caught your eye.
Maybe it was something you’d been thinking about for years.
Maybe it was something you’d never considered until that precise moment.
You pointed at it.
“That one.”
And that was enough.
There’s something wonderfully direct about that exchange.
No mood board. No Pinterest rabbit hole. No six-week email chain debating the relative merits of three different varieties of rare flower from the deep, primeval rainforest of French Guiana.
Just a moment of recognition.
I like that.
I want that.
Let’s fucking go.
And there’s another dimension to flash that I think gets overlooked in our obsession with customization.
Flash is an artist’s vision at its most unfiltered.
When I paint a sheet of flash, I’m not trying to solve somebody else’s creative problem. I’m not interpreting a collection of references or negotiating the expectations of a someone who thinks rolling cones is therapy.
I’m making something because I want to make it. Because I think it looks cool.
The composition, the colors, the subject matter, the little decisions that give the image its personality. They’re all mine.
It’s an expression of what I find interesting, beautiful, ridiculous, or worth putting out into the world to piss off the squares.
And when somebody chooses one of those designs, they’re not just buying a picture.
They’re responding to a point of view.
There’s a certain trust involved in that.
On my end, the confidence to put something on the wall and say, “This is finished. This is how I think it should look.”
On theirs, the confidence to recognize something they love without feeling obligated to project onto it.
That exchange is rare, pure and liberating. It’s the beauty of finding something. It’s why you have to stand in line for Melrose Trading Post like it’s a summer Saturday at Magic Mountain.
I think we’ve become so accustomed to having things made specifically for us that we’ve forgotten the pleasure of finding something that already exists.
The perfect old jacket in a thrift store.
An album you bought because the cover art was dope.
A book you pulled off a shelf because it had a provocative title, without ever having heard of the author.
There is a certain kind of magic in discovering something you weren’t looking for.
Something that existed independently of your expectations, waiting for the moment you happened to cross paths with it.
An original painting on a wall. A little piece of somebody else’s imagination. Something tangible in a world increasingly organized around search terms, filters, recommendations, and spoon fed trends that had a foot in the grave before you even decided your aesthetic was about as edgy as an orange.
Tattoo flash was shit posting on that thread long before you got there, @skedamsel473289.
And maybe that’s the real return on investment.
Not that choosing flash is inherently better than commissioning a custom tattoo.
But that it asks something different of us.
It asks us to stop searching for a moment.
To trust our eyes. Our hearts.
To recognize that an immediate connection to something can be every bit as meaningful as an idea we’ve spent six months refining under carefully curated Chat GPT gaslighting.
Because meaning doesn’t always have to lead the experience.
Sometimes it comes afterward.
In the memories we attach to an object. In the people we meet. In the stories we collect while carrying something through the world. In a butt plug with a banner that says “Up Yours.”
A tattoo doesn’t have to contain your entire life story on the day you get it.
It has the rest of your sad little life to disappoint your judgmental family and your fake ass friends.
I guess I don’t really miss Blockbuster all that much.
I don’t miss the late fees, the scratched DVDs, or finding out the movie I wanted had already been rented by everyone else with no life on a Friday night.
But I do miss the feeling of making a choice and being satisfied with it.
Of picking something because it looked interesting, taking it home, and giving it a chance.
Not because I’d exhausted every possible alternative.
But because something about it spoke to me. And that was enough.
I think there’s room for a little more of that in our lives.
A little less programmed optimization.
A little more human instinct.
And maybe the next time you walk into a tattoo shop, instead of arriving with forty-seven Pinterest images and a Google Sheets of your personal symbolism with footnotes, take a minute to look at the walls.
At the shit that real artists do.
You might find something you didn’t know you were looking for.
And sometimes, that’s better than finding exactly what you thought you wanted.
