Midnight Society: Get a bamboo tattoo in a bar on a tropical Thai island -- check

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Pete Seeger
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According to Ryan Dudzinski and Ollie White, I have strange luck. Like, very good luck. I buy that. I guess I just never thought about it.

Ryan thinks its lucky that I can go couch surfing and not get murdered. Or travel wherever I feel like without ever making arrangements. I wouldn't consider that luck, exactly. Most people don't get murdered. And most people can show up in a city and find food and shelter. So I never agreed.

It was until a few days ago that Ollie said the same thing, that I think I might be getting a reputation as a lucky person. This time is wasn't about getting murdered. It was about getting hepatitis or something like that.

Cut to Ollie and I on Koh Chang (again) for a long weekend. I am back in Thailand for a few days as a pit stop on the way to India. So Ollie and I decided to head back to our favorite island.

Last day on the island. Dropped off our motorbikes and aloe'd our sunburns and went to our favorite bar for a giant hamburger and a beer. Now, when I say "bar," I mean a structure with two standing walls and a bamboo roof that has deemed itself "Margaritaville."

It was here, over our burgers that we met the owner - a nice tatted guy from Sweden - and his compatriot, Charlie, who is apprenticing as a bamboo tattoo artist on the island.

Now, I've always been interested in getting a bamboo tattoo. Back in the day they would whittle down a stick of bamboo to a fine point and use it to hand-tattoo people in monasteries. Today, they attach a tattoo needle to the end so they can make finer lines.

After talking to Charlie for all of five minutes - keep in mind I couldn't understand most of what he was saying through his thick British accent - before I decided now is the time for one of these tattoos. A quick conversation and a brief pencil sketch later, we were in business. 500 baht. 30 minutes. We pay for his Diet Cokes during and his Singha beers after.

So this is how I found myself sitting on the floor of Margaritaville, hunched over a chair with delightful young Brit jabbing a needle into my neck. I requested Johnny Cash as the tattoo music and the the bar owner obliged. So, Johnny, Elvis, CCR and some other blues/rockabilly later, I had this to show for it.

This is my Pete Seeger tattoo. For his 90th birthday, while I was living on the reservation, I wrote him a letter about he inspires me to go to new places and write about different kinds of people and whatnot. You can see his postcard and my letter to him here.

I know he would probably hate the tattoo. He's not that kind of guy. But I love it. And I loved getting on Koh Chang.

As Pete would say, keep on.