My job is going poorly--my own fault; I'm distracted, disorganized, bored, and surly. Instead of writing copy myself, I farm it out to freelancers and do high-level shitwork: proposal-writing, scope documents, business plans, the ephemeral paper nonsense of the agency. I've been talking it out with my boss, so that I don't need to quit to go freelance, and we're finding a way to get me back in the boat. But I usually wake up feeling awful and full of dread, like in the dark days of elementary school.

After a week of trying to figure out the relationship between art and work (there isn't one), exploring the tension between what I want to do (nothing), what I need to do (write freely), and what feeds my ego (to be paid), it was Friday. I felt low and raw, so I went out to get drunk with Alex, straying around Alphabet City. We began to talk about tattoos, and after calling each other "pussy" a few times, made a decision with a coin toss. Heads, we began looking for a parlor.

The first one was shuttered; we found Fun City tattoos next, unpainted plywood walls, where a leathery woman asked, "what do you kids want?" As she explained a series of expensive options, we watched the owner of the shop slide a billy club into his jacket. He walked out to the tall man standing in the doorway, and said loudly, "don't be selling on my stoop, you fuck." The tall man shuffled off.

We found a third parlor a block farther, set up like a barbershop, clean and fluorescent. A 20-year old woman with coke-wide eyes and piercings on her lip, chin, eyebrow, nose, and ears, in black fishnets and tight, tight miniskirt asked us, sweetly, if we wanted pierced.

We did, looking at her--what fellow doesn't like woman with track marks drilling holes through his face? But we were here for tattoos, so we sat in turn on a small stool, as a silent, skinny man steered the needle around our skin.

My friend went first. On a napkin, he had sketched a small smiley face with a completely flat mouth--not a smile, not a frown. He has a cute personal aesthetic, drives a Volkswagen Beetle, wears his pants baggy with the cuffs rolled, plays acoustic guitar, and works in kid's TV. The little face worked fine. "Maybe in a few years I can add the smile," he said.

The tattoo artist photocopied the napkin to reduce the image, agitating the roaches that lived in the copier. Some scuttled out. The woman with piercings said, "ulgh." He sat my friend down, swabbed his arm, pulled out a fresh needle, and began to work.

I sat down next, at midnight. It feels good, like the old cutting when I was in middle and high school and liked slicing my arms with a kitchen knife, a blood-release spoon-feeding endorphins into the veins, mixed with seven or eight pints of beer, the needle buzzing like a giant brass mosquito. I understand why it's hard to stop at one tattoo. I'd like to cover myself with them, now.

I'd wanted one for a few years, but too many people asked: "what about when you're 80 and you regret it?" Asking me to question my 80-year-old self is a regrettably stupid rhetorical position. The point of a tattoo is that you are not yet 80. In 2054, I'll will have seen ground wars between Delaware and Maryland, mass death from psychic computer virii, cybertronic orgasms, bad feelie TV, hovercars, 7 or 8 more corrupt presidents, and supercomputers the size of acorns. If after all this I care about a thin circle of ink with an "f" in the middle--the official Ford/Ftrain brand logo--engraved on my left shoulder, then I will have lived the meek, pointless life I want to avoid, lost in the sort of existence where you warn people against being tattooed.

Why be so afraid of permanence? I want to remember who I am, not toss it away with each new job or January. A mark on the arm puts me in time and space: New York City, 1999, (f)train, (f)ord. It was good to acknowledge my body by marking it, putting a private label on myself, nailing myself down. It feels good to have something I know will be with me until I'm dead, and for a few years after, as long as my left arm stays attached. I can't get rid of this, but I can't lose it, either.

It's a mnemonic, a reminder to quit my job before too long and start writing full-time, even if the novel or whatever else is entirely doomed to failure. I don't expect to survive on the work, or to succeed in any grand literary pursuit, but the itch is getting worse to just do it and stop talking about it, to keep from turning 40 and wondering if I could have made it as a young writer, to stop these 1-hour essays and move into the realm of days and days of editing and massaging, each sentence a story. If I fail, I'd like to fail dramatically, desparately, something with a little drama, something off the even keel and 20-knots-straight-ahead navigational course I've charted.

Telling this to my girlfriend, she asked, "what if you get bored?" But this never bores me, this written space. I need to do other things to feed it, so that I do not become an inky drudge, but since I was 11, younger, I keep coming back and spewing words on paper when I need to work things through. I'm ashamed I haven't gotten any farther than I have by now, disappointed that I didn't try for the Iowa Writer's Workshop or the Rhetoric Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon, but I wanted money and peace, and academia has neither. And I knew both of those programs would have rejected me outright--an average student, an untutored writer, and ignorant rhetorician with no Latin and no Greek. So I came to New York.

Working on the private side of the Ftrain, the part I don't put online, I've been getting closer to what I need to write, the topics I can't approach in front of an audience. What I need to write is sometimes vile, fixated, raw. It's selfish prose, written in an awkward, incantatory style which I don't want to bring inside, a style better suited to the heath than the hearth. This side of Ftrain, the one you see, is my public face, a collection of daily texts, written to express attitudes of daily life, intended to amuse or evoke, written quickly to maintain the ritual of writing. The private writing is a scourge, something that should be held in the hand, not read on a screen, and I do it slowly, sometimes a sentence a day.

It was good to feel the needle, to know that I was real and aching. The tattoo needle puts mind and body back together while it buzzes. You make a conscious decision to hurt a little, to be transformed and altered. You have control, for a fee, over your appearance, your personal symbols--whether little red devils, tribal symbols, or an "f" in a circle--blooming over your flesh.

I was thinking all this, sitting in the little stool, getting a logo cut into me. After a few moments of the bee-sting buzzing and a single imprecation that "there is absolutely no moving around," the man with the needle wiped my shoulder and smeared it with a little cream. "It looks good," I told him.

"It looks like a brand," he said.

I wanted to take out one of my business cards, the one that reads "Brand Strategist," and show him. But he wouldn't have enjoyed the irony--not to mention it wasn't funny--so I just took another look before rolling down my sleeve. The "f" had a tiny serif on its foot, a little kick. It was rough and solid, like a good prison tattoo. I was happy with it.

We paid with my Visa card, tipped $30 cash, and went out for a chicken salad sandwich for my friend and a tuna melt for me. My friend instantly began to speak his regrets. "That was stupid. I want to get it laser-removed."

"Shut up," I said. "Laser removal is for pussies. And it discolors your skin. It's only for Hell's Angels who find Jesus."

"Really? It discolors you?"

"Let's get in a fight," I said. "We're badass now." We began looking around the restaurant for people we could beat down. Most of them looked soft, East Village refugees. The people to our right were talking about web sites. Half were the kind of people who would say, "tattoos are too trendy," and the other half would say, "what will your kids say?" They needed thrashed.

Alex and I are gentrified white trash, older versions of the kids who like Metallica, who shotgun Pabst and grow their hair too long. Our childhood friends work on cars, sleep on couches, live in little houses with posters tacked on the wall. Something about the tattoo--especially in face of my job, where the baseline employee is savvy and suburban, or perhaps a trustafarian--felt appropriate and honest, a recall to the uncultured roots. (My parents had some culture, but they didn't have anything on my peers in terms of influence.)

A little later, without throwing a single punch, we took a cab back to Brooklyn. I wanted to take the Ftrain, mostly to provide a decent ending for this entry, which I'd already started to write in my head, but he talked me out of it. I rolled in at 2:30, sleepy and trashed. In bed, I smeared the black-marked skin with ointment, before picking up the phone to dial my girlfriend, which is another story entirely and not for this screen.