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This is the story of how I agreed to get a tattoo of Hall and Oates fighting a Balrog. It is the kind of story that should not really happen to someone once they've passed the age of twenty three, but here I am at thirty nine making rash promises on social networks. I will never do that again, until the next time I do it.

It started when I wrote this:

Which prompted this:

Having no good answer at hand, I closed my eyes and wrote down the first thing that appeared in my mind:

Then the irrational entered. When I have pressing tasks at hand (I had a restaurant review to write, but since I'd only eaten two dishes there, and on both occasions I had to physically walk up to a server with my menu in hand and order food by basically getting in their faces until they agreed to bring me my bebimbap, I didn't want to write it, because it was making me angry and depressed about the state of restaurant service in this town), I turn to Twitter and I start making up sentences that could not practically exist anywhere else, just to stir up some attention:

And then:

And then:

Because I thought it would be one of those ludicrous pop culture mashups that could never have existed before they invented irony. But irony is like a Penrose staircase that keeps plodding upward, riser by riser. Even when you think you've reached the summit, another section unfolds itself:

I was all full of brio:

Anyway, an actual artist read the exchange:

And like a fool with a deadline I said to the actual artist:

And the upshot is this:

This will be my first tattoo.