Sunrise at the beach at the end of my street.
I somehow had not noticed until today, how contiguous the graffiti on the wall had gotten.
For liking the graffiti, I am some sort of traitor to the class I was supposedly born into. I’m supposed to not like the graffiti, I’m supposed to be appalled at the disruption of law and order, same as I’m supposed to be appalled at the number of people curled up sleeping in the parking lot.
I am saddened and appalled but not for the reasons that society says I should be. I’m supposed to want more of our tax money to go to “law and order.” Instead, I want people to have the right to sleep outdoors if that’s the only place they have to go and nothing better is being offered to them. Or, even if that’s not the case, I want people to have the right to sleep outdoors.
I’m supposed to think of graffiti as a “broken windows” crime. Instead, I am quietly celebrating feral self-expression; tiny scraps of human vitality that spring up unauthorized. Like the dune flowers who spring up amid the rocks, defying the feral-flower-assassin trucks that roll into my beach neighborhood with their tree-hearses and their straight-line noisemakers.
Update 2 days later: I was down there at the wall again this morning and some power-that-be had started painting white to cover the graffiti on the wall.