passing the torch means lighting a fire.

every once in a great while,
i still get a little bit busy.
just a little,
and only where nobody will see me doing it.
tattooing in a new shop,
without even attempting to see if it's okay?
jeez,
turns out,
i'm kind of a jerk.
but,
i'm a jerk enabled by the privileges afforded by befriending
other OTHER elitist privileged jerks.
those are my people, it turns, out.
expert recognize expert,
what can i say?
yeah.
i tattooed on a day that twilight tattoo was closed,
on shawn's inner thigh,
for five hours straight.
why?
because we like each other,
and we are both finally in a place where i'm playing catch-up,
and he's showing off his skills.
it happens.
han solo spent some time in carbonite,
i spent some time in north conway,
and when we woke up,
the jedi were back in action.
yeah.
that's a thing.
anyway,
shawn needed a tattoo of the most potato-like of enormous
angry territorial vegetarian battle-beasts.
they are, in fact, difficult to make look dynamic.
i drew a dinosaur with ears, basically,
and added a few pounds for good measure,
just to try and activate some sort of worthy tribute
to the eight-tusked riverhorse.
check the teleport:
they sweat red like blood!
they eat grass like cows!
they kill ALL the things that stop in their area!
they eat them up to make them disappear,
like rome erasing hannibal,
like egypt erasing akhenaten,
(site specific references, you're welcome)
and poop them out everywhere,
in furious gouts of explosive diarrhea!!!
and somehow, that helps the ecosysytem or somethin'.
nature wins, so hard.
anyway,
check the teleport:

yuuuuuuuuuuuuup.
that's it.
took me three tries to get a drawing that didn't look like a starchy root.
no jokes.

but,
adding a little vegetation an' that,
and some centipede-ribbon waves, too,
both helped conceal the blarpity mess
that the low-end of a hippo has to offer.
awwwwwwwwwwwww.
big is beautiful, sometimes...

and other times,
it's a savage stormswept bristle-bearded fattie
boombattie underwater thunderclap of crusty toes and brutal teeth.
***********
we do grown-up stuff now, i guess.
trading things,
mutually respecting each other,
being prone to discourse on the nature of divergent world views.....
we doo-doo that adult-type intellectual sh!t.
not that it matters in groups of four or more,
then it's balls-out connecticut-type loud fresh hardness for all y'all faces.
that's real.
you can get older,
wiser,
and more mellow and/or tolerant,
but in tandem,
two worthy warrior poets will always take
being brutal, blunt, and combative back from the
brink of extinction by the core of civilized society,
and reengage with even more abrasive abusive and effusive
sh!t-talking from the future.
to eleven or more, and beyond.
real life times,
with real life people?
uh-huh.
we're mostly grown up,
but we're still doing a lot of the same sh!t.
das it;
never quiet, never soft.....