A piercing thought... 17.07.08
YOU know I’ve never really
quite got the whole piercing thing. You know the
sticking bits of metal into bits of your body –
deliberately.
I guess there are some who like to do it to shock people
or, well to be honest I don’t really know why, but I
know that it never appealed to me.
Not that I’m against it per say, I think people are
quite entitled to if that’s their thing, but I never
really liked pain all that much and anything that would
involve pain being inflicted on me, however short that
period of time might be, is something that I try to
avoid at all costs.
That’s why for instance blood tests and needles and
stuff are not exactly high up on my list of things that
I like either and it’s not cos I can’t stand the sight
of blood or anything.
I have been unfortunate enough to have to have taken
some such tests in the past and while I’m pretty certain
I build up the extent of the pain much more in my head
than it ever |
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actually turns out to be,
it’s still not a thing that I have ever looked forward
to with any kind of comforting thought.
Which leads me to wonder why anybody would want somebody
to come along and deliberately shoot a hole in their
body so they could then fill that hole with a piece of
metal that quite often festers into a horrible gooey
mess.
And the thing is piercing seems to have gone up a notch
or seven since the time when I was growing up and only
girls and really tough blokes had their ears pierced.
Of course the really tough blokes didn’t have both ears
pierced, they usually had one ear pierced and even then
only ever as far as I recall wore a wee gold stud
ear-ring.
Unless they were a pirate of course and then they could
wear some hind of a hoopy thing, but there were never
too many pirates around when I was growing up apart from
the odd boy in the eighties who might have sold a dodgy
video tape or two.
But anyways by and large it was just the tough guys and
the girls who had ear rings. I wasn’t a tough guy and I
have never had an ear-ring but I do have eight sisters,
about half a million nieces and girl cousins and now two
daughters, so over the years I have seen the pain a
festering ear ring can cause.
With that in mind I could never even begin to
contemplate some of the piercings that seem to be all
the rage these days and the pain that they could bring
to areas that should never have to be bathed with
antiseptic.
And all this came to mind when I saw a guy in a shopping
centre in Dublin last week with a huge amount of
piercings and a tee shirt that said ‘I can’t go through
the day without shocking at least one stranger.’
I guess some people might have been shocked, he did
after all look as if he had tripped and fallen head
first into a box of fishing tackle, but it just caused
me to wonder how much pain he had to through to get to
look like he did. |
And that was before I began
to think about the hassles involved – for instance could
you imagine getting caught in the queue at the airport
screening machine behind somebody like him?
Beep….Beep….beep. “Oh sorry, I thought I had them all,
umm you might want to look away for a minute while I
umm, ah, umm, ah ok I think I have it….hope that’s the
last of them.”
I have always thought it was a pain that I have to take
off my shoes and belt going through those machines, but
how much of a pain must it be for a guy with so many
piercings….and that’s even before any of them begin to
fester! |
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A DROP OF
PORTER is
the weekly
column of
Inishowen
Independent
editor,
Liam Porter. |
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