What Ten Years Does to a Flesh Tunnel

Somewhere in the mid-2000s, half the guys I knew were stretching their earlobes and talking about gauges and flesh tunnels like they’d discovered something the rest of us hadn’t figured out yet. And for a while it worked, in the way that committed subcultural aesthetics tend to work when you’re twenty and the person wearing them has the right face.

The right face doesn’t last. The stretched earlobes do. Looking at pictures of what gauged ears look like after you take the jewelry out—years later, decades later—the result is a ragged flap of skin hanging off the side of someone’s head that no amount of goodwill can make okay. I’m glad I kept my hands to myself. The people who didn’t have my sympathy, and also, apparently, the vocabulary word yolo, which feels like its own punishment.