Human nature combined with misery (read: Sunday after the Baltimore loss), unfortunately, leads us too many times to take weird pleasure in the pain of others. I'm as guilty as anybody (see my "Louisiana fan" posts from earlier this week). So when people were checking with me on "Texans Super Bowl Tattoo Guy" and "how he was doing," most of those asking I'm sure wanted to hear how much Brown regrets the tattoo, how stupid he feels, and they want to know when he's scheduling the surgery to have it removed. Basically, anything short of Brown in the fetal position wailing "I'M AN IDIOT! I'M AN IDIOT!" like Scotty after he tried to kiss Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights would be unacceptable to Schadenfruede Fan.
Those of you hoping for that outcome will be disappointed.
When I asked Brown how he was processing the game as it went along, especially the final score, he said, "Honestly, I didn't even think about the tattoo. I just processed it like a normal game. In fact, the tattoo wasn't even on my mind until right after the game when my phone started blowing up, and my friends were calling me and texting me 'HA HA!'"
Nice friends, huh? Brown laughed and said,"Hey, if we can't pick on our friends, who can we pick on?"
Okay, so we established that the tattoo had become enough of a fixture to where he didn't obsess about it game in and game out. That's probably not a surprise, as Brown has many tattoos on his body ("A walking biography," he says. "Some I like, some I regret. Like life.") and the Texans tattoo essentially became like a new member of his tattoo family.
But it does say "SUPER BOWL XLVI." I mean, it's factually WRONG. So naturally, Brown is hoping the Texans win the whole thing in the next two years so he can add a Roman numeral "I" to the end of it and correct it, right?
Wrong.
"I specifically did the shading around the Roman numeral so it would represent THIS season. I can't add an 'I' to it, and I don't want to," Brown said.
Instead of seeing the tattoo as a permanent typo, Brown prefers to see the ink as a constant reminder of a great season, and a fifteen-minute period of fame that he really wasn't aware of until about the fourteenth minute. Brown had no idea about the magnitude of Deadspin coverage ("They wrote about Rob Lowe today, I know that"), and he admits that his wife got far more angry over pieces that poked fun at Brown than he did.
