The Fun Appointment

I have a big mouth.

When my daughter was little she would always roast me at the dinner table. “Dad are you going to unlock your jaw and swallow that chicken whole.”

This was after she already told me that I was getting a gut and that my teeth looked “lellow.”

Kids are brutal.

But she wasn’t wrong. One of the benefits to having a big mouth is that my wisdom teeth came in with little trouble or fanfare. For years they weren’t an issue.

So when I got my first cavity in my early thirties and it was one of my wisdom teeth, I figured maybe it was finally time to get those things out.

I made an appointment with my dentist to have them extracted. We decided to do one at a time so I wouldn’t have to be put under. Bottom right was the first project and it turned out to be a nightmare. The root was wrapped around my jaw. Three hours, eleven vials of novocaine and a mountain of bloody gauze later, I had stitched up gums and a whole new pile of emotional trauma.

At one point the dentist braced herself with her foot on the chair, and I thought to myself, “what the fuck did I get myself into?”

I had made the appointment, taken time out of my day, fought through traffic like a kamikaze pilot that just got a Dear John letter. All to sit down next to a tray of medieval torture instruments that looked like they belonged in a museum in France.

And they used every single one of them.

It’s a lot to go through just to get back to some kind of homeostasis. After I left, I didn’t feel better or have some oppressive affliction eliminated. I just preemptively removed something from my skull that could have potentially become a problem.

I still had three of them left. That meant I had three more turns of this to be done. It ended up being two after I lost one in a bar fight, but that’s a story for another time.

Most appointments we make in life are some version of this.

Maybe not three hours of dental combat complete with a woman using your chest for leverage like a steelworker lining up a beam. But the basic arrangement is similar. You move your life around to make time, look for parking, fill out paperwork and part with money that has a hundred better uses just to maintain the status quo.

Adulthood is full of appointments we make because something is wrong, or something might be wrong, or eventually will be wrong if we don’t beseech the mighty maintenance merchants for scheduled assessment.

The doctor, the dentist, the mechanic. The DMV. Nobody jumps out of bed stoked because today’s finally the day they get their transmission checked.

But for some reason,  I chose a career built almost entirely around appointments.

Mine involve needles and pain too, but, slight caveat, people are happy to come to them.

I hear it all the time.

“I’ve been looking forward to this all week.”

Sometimes they took the day off work. Sometimes they show up with coffee and snacks like they’re gonna cruise up the PCH to The Bay. Sometimes, they’ve made plans for lunch afterward. Maybe dinner. Maybe their friend came along. Maybe this is the thing they bought themselves for their birthday.

Sometimes they just shoot me straight.

“This is my self-care day.”

I always liked hearing that, but I don’t think I truly considered what it really meant for a long time.

Because for me, it’s work.

I’m looking at the clock. Thinking about the next appointment. Wondering if I’m low on Bactine. Trying to figure out if The Rams are gonna beat the spread. Thinking about bills, traffic, lunch, the stencil that suddenly decided it no longer believes in adhesion, or whatever other completely mundane bullshit has occupied my brain that day.

Meanwhile, the person walking through the door might have been looking forward to this for a month.

That’s an interesting angle.

Your Tuesday at work can be somebody else’s Saturday.

Tattooing is an unnecessary profession. Nobody needs an eagle tattoo. Nobody has ever been rushed into an emergency room because their forearm was dangerously low on skulls and roses.

People come because they want to.

They save for it. They make room for it in their schedule. They drive across town for it. They sit through something that hurts and hand over money they worked for because, for whatever reason, this is the thing they decided to do for themselves.

Sometimes there’s a larger meaning attached to it. Sometimes it marks a person, a place or a point in their life they don’t want to forget.

And sometimes they just wanted a skull and dagger to tell the world to go fuck itself right where it shits.

I think both are equally valid.

Not every tattoo needs to be a chapter in somebody’s autobiography. Sometimes doing something for yourself is meaning enough.

There’s a lot of talk about self care these days. Some of it has become its own industry. Buy this. Subscribe to that. Download this app so your phone can remind you to put your phone down. Heal in private but make a TikTok about it.

I don’t know what qualifies anymore.

But I do know what it looks like when somebody sits down in my chair, puts their phone away and realizes that for the next couple hours there isn’t anywhere else they’re supposed to be.

Nobody needs anything from them.

The emails can wait.

The laundry can wait.

Whatever bullshit was happening at work when they left can continue happening without them.

For a little while, their only responsibility is to sit still.

Well, reasonably still.

And I get to be part of that.

Tattooing can be a frustrating way to make a living. There are slow months. Cancellations. No-shows. Supplies keep getting more expensive. Social media has convinced an entire generation of artists that if they don’t film themselves doing their job, there’s an outside chance it never happened.

There are days when it feels like any other job.

Then somebody walks through the door excited to see you.

They’ve been waiting for this.

Maybe they saved for months. Maybe they’ve followed your work for years. Maybe they could have gone to a hundred other tattooers in a city full of them and, for reasons you may never completely understand, they picked you.

That deserves a moment of consideration.

Someone took a piece of their limited free time and their hard-earned money and decided that spending it sitting across from you sounded like the kind of escape they needed.

I feel incredibly fortunate to make a living that way.

I’ve had enough jobs in my life where nobody was particularly excited to see me. I’ve had enough appointments where I certainly wasn’t excited to see them.

I’ve sat in the chair while a dentist treated my face like they were plunging a toilet.

I know what the bad appointment feels like.

It isn’t lost on me that somehow, I get to be the good one.