We were all young and foolish once. One must be young and foolish before one can be old and wise. But hopefully most of us have only fond memories and a few war stories from that era in our lives. Nothing too permanent or concrete. That is not the case for Miley Cyrus, unfortunately. She’s just gotten a tattoo, something of a memorial to her recently deceased dog Floyd, that I’m afraid she’ll come to regret.
Not the dog part, necessarily. Sure, her grief over the dog’s passing will lessen and lessen as the years go by, and eventually she will just remember him as a nice dog she had once, so maybe a tattoo memorial is a little grandiose. But mostly that’s fine. If it’s part of her grieving process, then I hope it helps.
The trouble is what the tattoo says. See, there’s a speech bubble coming out of the dog’s mouth and the dog is saying, “With a little help from my fwends.” Yes, “fwends.” As in a jokey baby-talk way to say the word “friends.” This is, undoubtedly, an inside joke between Cyrus and some friends, excuse me, fwends, and as we all know, nothing is more enduring than an inside joke. Just kidding, nearly everything is more enduring than little passing jokes shared between friends. Especially ones that involve saying a word in a funny way. Miley and her pals will have forgotten all about this little joke by Thanksgiving, is my guess, and yet there the word will be, right there on her torso.
And then, for the rest of her life, she will have to explain it. When she is in her 30s and trying on her wedding dress, a woman with pins in her mouth looking quizzically at it, Miley smiling and saying, “Oh, it’s a joke. It’s fwends? Like friends?” Miley at 40, her son pointing at the tattoo poking out from her bathing suit top, Miley having to say, “It says fwends, Braydon. Like friends? It’s a joke I used to make when I was younger.” Miley Cyrus at 55, an empty nester all of a sudden, getting back on the dating scene after her divorce.
Things escalating with the nice lawyer her friend Barbara set her up with, making out like a teenager for the first time in many years, then having to sigh and explain to her date, “Oh, it says fwends. It was a thing we used to say, back in 2014 I think. Who knows. We were young and silly.” Miley at 80, in her assisted-living facility, a nurse helping her dress for the lawyer’s funeral, her husband of 25 years. The nurse saying, “Now what’s this you’ve got here Miss Miley? Fw-” “Yes, dear, it says fwends.
I got that long before you were even born. It says fwends.” Miley at 100, no longer living, a mortician gazing at the tattoo, sounding out the word before shrugging and covering it up with spray-on makeup. And then, Miley in eternity, Miley skipping through the cosmos with the rest of our souls, awash in starlight and mystery, the infinity asking what it all means and Miley telling the infinity, “It was just this weird way we said ‘friends.’ You know, fwends. It was funny. A long time ago, so very long ago.”
At least she won’t be alone on this journey. Two of her fwends also got the exact same tattoo. And one of them has absolutely no excuse. Because he is Wayne Coyne, of the Flaming Lips, and he is 53 years old. So he has zero business getting an inside-joke tattoo that he will later come to regret. He should be past the age of mistakes like that. And yet, there he is. And there his girlfriend is.
Standing with Miley, the three of them fwends, bound together forever. In a million years when the aliens find evidence of these photos they will find no real way to translate this mysterious word. Its meaning finally gone for good, like a dog you once knew, a long time ago, who left one day and never came back.
