Holey Man

Simon asked the Gren: What's up with the nose piercing? Why'd you get it in the first place and decide to do away with it? You probably wouldn't be married to Moonshot if you hadn't lost it before meeting her, so do you believe in fateful timing, or was that just blind coincidence?

I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have told you what a pain ritual was when I was in 9th grade. In fact, I’m fairly certain I didn’t stumble across the term until some time in college. But when I did finally have it described to me, it clicked in a way that said, “Of course! That’s exactly what I’ve been feeling all these years.”

The basic concept is the marking of a life event, achievement, or milestone with a “ceremony” that a) is painful and b) leaves a mark. Painful because it shouldn’t be easy. Whatever it is that you’re commemorating took hard work and sacrifice, the symbolic version should be no different. And there should be a mark because that mark will remain as the reminder of the life event.

I blame my parents for this type of thinking. You see, I had wanted to get my ear pierced when I was in school. They wanted to give me enough freedom to express myself, but also wanted to make sure I wasn’t rushing into such things on a whim. Thus, I was told that I could have my ear pierced when I was 15. Reasonable, but my friend Brock, two years younger than me, already had his ear pierced and was more than willing to remind me of it. It was an agonizing wait.

Luckily, Mom was willing to round my age up a bit and shave about a month off the wait. On the last day of school of my freshman year, my final day as a junior high student, we journeyed into Osage Beach and got my left ear pierced at some place where the “ceremony” involved a pink plastic gun in the hands of a gum-chewing fellow teenager. It was, at the time, the only option I knew of and I walked out with the desired stud in my ear. So I was thrilled.

Perhaps it was due to the piercing coinciding with the completion of an academic level or perhaps I would have made this connection on my own, but I instantly began viewing my earring as a symbol of my completion of junior high, my entrance into high school. I equated that single stud with transition. The concept of a pain ritual had entered my psyche even though the term itself was still years away.

By the time I turned 16, I had moved on to a small 16-gauge hoop and returned to the needle to commemorate my driver’s license, giving me two holes through my left ear. High school graduation was marked by a hoop through my right lobe and then I took a break for a while as I went away to college and learned to over-analyze these things and use terms like shamanistic pain ritual. I vividly remember watching a documentary in which a suited gentleman with a bone through his nose said (and I’m paraphrasing):

“Pain rituals are not done solely for decoration, it's part of an initiation, a rite of passage. It's part of transformation.”

On the pain itself he said:

“If, while walking, I accidentally walk into a thorn or a needle and pierce my skin, there is a sensation of pain. It is a message sent by my brain to alert me to the danger to which I was previously unaware. On the contrary, if I pick up that same needle and consciously decide to pierce my skin with it, contemplate the act and deliberately do so, there is an intense sensation…but it is not exactly pain. The skin sends the same message, the same endorphins are released, but the brain, in knowing exactly what is going on, processes the information differently.”

To which I said, “Rock on!!” I would later learn that that suited-gentleman was Fakir Musafar, the godfather of the “modern primitive” movement, but at the time he was just a cool looking dude saying things that made a lot of sense to me.

In the following years, I relished my newfound ability to intellectualize what was a fairly common tribal marking of my generation. However, when my next life event unfolded, I was ready to contemplate that needle with deliberation once again.

A few weeks after my Dad died in the fall of ’97, I jumped in the car with two college friends and headed down to St. Louis to find a reputable piercer. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted yet, nose or nipple, but I knew that I was no longer going to trust it to a pink, plastic gun. I found the look of the nose piercing more appealing, but the nipple was more painful, and that suited my mindset at the time. So, I settled on my right nipple.

It was strange. The pain (or sensation of whatever) was fully bearable…intense, but bearable. What I was truly not prepared for was the endorphin rush. I had to step outside. I paced the balcony overlooking the St. Louis Loop as I took in the cold November air and tried not to throw up.

It was exhilarating.

A year later, I was living in Breckenridge, CO, but had come back to Missouri to be with my family on the first anniversary of Dad’s death. On my way out of town I swung into the piercer. I’m not exactly sure what I was commemorating. It was sort of a combination one-year-without-Dad and moving-out-on-my-own deal. But really, I think I just wanted to get a nose-ring and was looking for a reason.

I don’t think anyone really liked my nose ring. My family hated it, my friends found it silly…but I loved it. I worked as an electrician up in Breck and just loved the interactions it would inspire. I remember one very well in which a little old lady who had called for service work answered her door. An uncomfortable/terrified look flashed across her face. She tried hard not to stare at my nose and then tried harder to avoid me completely. Eventually, she mustered the courage to ask the standard opening question, “Did that hurt?” After a few minutes of discussion, we were chatting comfortably. Her granddaughter had a pierced eyebrow and she was relishing my willingness to explain why someone would want to do such a thing.

She made me chocolate chip cookies.

A few months later I was living in Ft Lauderdale and took a job installing home theaters and such. The company frowned on the nose ring and I agreed to take it out during work hours. I figured I could maintain the hole that way for the six months or so that I planned to be in the south Florida area. Sadly, (or perhaps fortunately) the hole closed up during my first 8 hours shift and I said a sad goodbye to my facial piercing. I hated losing it but it was, as mentioned, the only piercing with no specific ties to a life event. I missed the ring itself, but didn't feel that I had lost something truly significant.

And so, it was a relatively normal-looking Moksha that met Moonshot in 2002. And that’s a good thing since I have no illusions that she would have taken an interest in me had I been sporting a metallic nostril. She barely tolerates the four 12-gauge rings I currently wear. However, to address the original question, I’m not one to believe in fate on this level. On the list of cosmic coincidences that made Moonshot and I perfect for each other, the lack of nasal jewelry was but a small factor. So no, I don’t personally believe the universe had a plan for my nose.

Things have been quiet on the body modification front for several years now. Between Moonshot and an office job…there’s not much room for more stainless steel. However, I am currently looking forward to some inkwork. Lack of funds prevented me from commemorating Norah’s birth in this way, but as soon as resources allow, I plan to make the Chinese wu-fu a permanent part of skin. It may take a while to save up the funds since a) it will be an expensive piece of art and b) Moonshot has made it clear that if I get to spend such money on a tattoo…she gets jewelry of equal value, thereby doubling the cost of my wu-fu ;) And I figure that’s fair. It will be, like the piercings before it, my own personal ritual commemorating the events of my life. If she wants to join in the celebration but skip the pain part of it…I don’t think many would blame her.