I was having a chat with a colleague this afternoon about living in the city. He shook his head in rejection of it. He liked the burbs, he said. Didn’t like the hustle and bustle of the grit. I can honestly say that the entire time I’ve lived here I’ve not once been hustled, and bustled only on a handful of occasions.

I think what he was referring to were the sometimes congested sidewalks, and usually congested roads downtown. The driving part can’t be helped much. Owning a car in the city is frivolous, if you ask me. Walking for half an hour to just about anything you need isn’t gonna kill either you or your kids — just look both ways. And the congested sidewalks are entirely avoidable — just walk over to the next parallel street. Or, if you don’t mind getting a bit more risqué, the next parallel alley.

Hang on to your hat, you’re never gonna believe what this place is called…

Graffiti Alley

Yeah, I know. I’m gonna go with Graffalley to try to salvage something from it. Maybe it should be District Graff, since it’s really crawling up each of the adjacent alleys too. And it’s on everything:

Okay, that’s kind of a crummy example. But you just have to turn around and travel backwards in time to see a slightly livelier one:

… Continue Reading

To use a bovine analogy, there are few things that allow me to stomach the sheer, brutal cud of incompetence that seems so prevalent these days.

A few days ago, for example, I was calling the credit company to declare that I was making my last payment on the card (and the horse it rode in on), and to ask if I “should expect a final interest charge between the time the payment is made and the time it’s actually processed.”

Doesn’t that seem like a common question? Of all the possible, even improbable answers I was expecting,  “how should we know what activities take place on your account?”, was just about the only one that didn’t cross my mind.  It’s hard to know how to reply to such insult-bordering statements without resorting to violence, but I managed to take in a breath and yield to a cool, curt, “because it’s your card”, while silently mouthing the word “jackass”.

Such tension releasers, however, often don’t come in the moment and are usually insufficient to make you feel better. Abusing your pets/family just isn’t practical these days, and sweet sweet vengeance usually ends up being a George Costanza-type affair that leaves you even more bitter. That dead horse has been beaten enough. Instead, solace must be taken where and when it can.

I take mine in the form of anonymous social commentary, usually spray-painted on walls or sidewalks. No, these are not the usual tags; those are just evidence of perennial self-indulgence. No one cares that you were here, “SnuR<hb 2K9 dash-swirl”! — if that is your real name.

I like the stuff that shows some thought other than “oh shit I’m so wasted, dude!” Stencils are great for this sort of thing. They’re physical evidence that someone planned the affair — going to the trouble of finding the appropriate image(s), contrasting the living bejeezus out of them, cutting them out, etc.  Their Holstein pattern, for me, always alludes to greener pastures where bullshit is actually nourishing, and the knowledge that someone out there really just wants to give me a chuckle. Here’s a taste.