On Tuesday, I was sitting in a chair at Energy Tattoo as P.J. Ferrante ran his needle over my flesh and I started thinking about my being editor in chief of the Daily Nexus for the last two years.

“Oh God, this fucking hurts,” I thought. “Why is this happening to me?”

Maybe it was the tattoo. Maybe it wasn’t.

Like the tattoo, being editor in chief was something I thought about a lot before I did it. I asked people who had done it before what it was like. I planned it carefully. I said to myself, “Self, when it’s your turn it will be better than it has ever been.”

Like the Nexus, the tattoo is etched into me and will be with me forever. Unlike the Nexus, the tattoo is better than I’d hoped it would be.

P.J. is, thankfully, much better at his job than I was at mine. Signing the $195 credit card receipt for my tattoo, I realized something: The Nexus paid me.

It wasn’t so bad after all. No offense to P.J., or maybe this is a compliment, but the Nexus gets in your blood more and vigorously wallows about the red corpuscles.

A newspaper is a gift. It gives you a look at what affects you, what interests you and what’s too damn weird for you to ignore. It’s all based on this faith, call it na