get up, kids.

don't forget your roots!
and when your building blocks rock your socks,
you can be sure they're square roots.
but if you're an aging artest at the end of the line,
near the top of the mountain,
at the bottom of the barrel,
well,
that's just gross.
hold on....
what's the square root of a gross?
twelve.
yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup.
now we're getting somewhere
*
hey there, my ninjas.
did you notice the time we've spanned?
just sayin',
it's career anniversary day...again.
neighbors,
even though it seems simultaneously like just yesterday,
and an interminable purgatorial forever,
at the exact same time,
it's actually been twelve F*ing years already.
yes, that's correct.
a dozen consecutive orbits around the sun
wherein i span countless hours, days, weeks, and months
devaluating futures through permanent cosmetic alterations.
uh-huh.
tattbombin', kids.
hard-styles for miles.
a dirty dozen of dispensed doo-doo butter,
spat hot fire,
and loud, fresh, hardness,
for every single bodys' face.
and unlike bagels or doughnuts,
or two six-packs of rootin' tootin' sarsaparilla, even,
this preteen turning point is just not that delicious.
twelve YEARS!
i don't even talk to almost any of the duders
whom i started out tatzapping on, with, and for.
from then until now,
it's been one seriously square-rooted gross-out
of active participation on an unlit career highway.
i do my dirt all by my lonely, homies.
that's no joke.
geographic isolationism,
coupled with the secrets of determinism,
and hard-style philosophical intolerance
have forced events to unfold in this direction.
i'm on that obvious inaccessible focus jauns.
i'm here, ninjas.
still here.
after all these F*ing years.
where did you go?
-
a dozen years,
a decade plus two,
today is the day.
a career summit,
a career nadir,
here and there,
and everywhere else, as well.
tattooing made me who i was,
but not who i am, folks.
so what do you get when you still do what you did,
now that you aren't who you were?
a straight-and-narrow nailed self-righteous arrow, right?
c'mon.
today is the day for reminiscing.
...wandering the k-10, as anniversaries end,
pondering events that brought us here....
(anybody?)
ah well,
it all just keeps happening.
more of all this.
really real life, kids.
this is What Is.
twelve years, on that, grind in a row,
and i've still got a bunch of hot smears of
weak-sauce skidmarking to skinscribe on some A*bags all day.
happy anniversay, indeed.
....
and,
to mark the occasion,
we've reached road's end on some other other sh!t.
symbolic severing, if you read into that sort of thing:
hamden is dead.
that's the truth, duders.
do you guys remember our dog, hamden?
yep.
the one who was named for my hometown,
as a memorial of the epic exodus away from
the withering waterbaby unworthiness of down-there?
uh-huh.
regrettably,
our nearly-nine-year-old ladyb!tch
reached the limits of her earthly leash last night.
and even though she lived with our friends these last years,
it's a farewell we feel over here, for sure.
if we were to read into this like seers, or english majors,
it'd be omens and term papers aplenty for days.
a milestone fit to make a mutha-ucka aware
of how far away he is from where he started.
literally, metaphorically, inevitably.
this is the one.
sh!t.
this is not a swan song,
but it goes;
never quiet, never soft.....