Analog Tweets

There's graffiti and there's the other kind of rogue messaging you find written out there in the world that is much less narcissistic. Sometimes poetic, sometimes informative, sometimes a little of both. As we increasingly read more and more off of electronic screens, the chance discovery of printed words on walls, bathroom stalls and picnic tables is a welcome and refreshing diversion (and change). Take this simple statement found on a piece of exposed, WW II era copper conduit in the Marin Headlands just above Ft. Cronkite. If you hike these trails you will notice that they are frequented by the animals identified on the crude sign above. This is because coyotes habitually defecate in the middle of human hiking trails, and their stringy gray, mostly mouse-hair droppings are ubiquitous. The land here supports a large population of these wily predators, and they make sure we know it; which is why a more appropriate tag for this pipe may have been H U M A N S. What's interesting is that this particular conduit once supplied power to the gun battery just a couple hundreds yards further up the bluff above. It is obviously defunct, and this land has been reclaimed by its natural inhabitants. Again, see above. Most people now habitually write what they think and feel, they choose to communicate publicly and, thanks to social networks, no thought seems to go unexpressed. That's why graffiti, the original status message, the original tweet, is now a legitimate classic art. The best graffiti is legible, logical and terse. It speaks aloud, and it comments and it ponders. When smart and funny people think carefully and leave little poetic breadcrumbs, it's a treat. It's nice to encounter virtual intelligence. And smiles bloom unexpectedly where the rain of wit and wisdom falls. 

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