Climbing up the Walls

I dream graffiti. I envision its spectacular array of colors and hues that shape into words and artwork. Each composition seems to speak a message to me that I can never translate into consciousness. Emotions, perceptions and memories of both the past and future meld with sensations that open eyelids cannot recreate.
In my visions, I take it, I taste it, I breathe it, I create it. Sometimes I get caught, sometimes I am free. Sometimes I am the wall itself.
Words, gibberish, like AKEP and KUK or BLIND and GIRL appear to me, but I can’t decipher their meaning.
I awake with a sense of emptiness, the soul exhaustion of an artistic wet dream.
Nothing as good as you imagine it.

*

When I started doing graffiti, less than a year ago, my stencils covered my neighborhood. For weeks, everywhere I looked made me smile. I feel I made my community a more vibrant and interesting place.
Since I’ve returned from the east coast, I noticed a lot of sticker vandalism and tagging scrawls all over my neighborhood, much more than usual. My artwork was long painted over. Now it is replaced with the scraggly handwriting of several self-indulged teenagers.
Behind Krupa’s sausages is one of my stencils of a pig, captioned “eat me”. It used to be the only graffiti on the entire wall. Now it is covered with names and aliases of a handwriting test gone wrong. I wonder, did I start this trend? Was I the can opener for this cylinder of vermin?
My first reaction is to despise it, to see it as an eyesore, just like cops or senior citizens would. The uncreative people who seek to uniform my city and keep it grey.
I always say that tagging is better than nothing. Better some awful John Hancock than a boring, blank electrical box. But my reaction contradicts this.
I wonder if I’m being socially conditioned or what. I want to appreciate it somehow, because it represents a scene I stand for, but I’m not sure I can.

*

I traveled to east Flag to visit a thrift store to buy some clothes. The store was cramped with incredibly worthless crap, even for Salvation Army. Most of the furniture was in a lot behind back. It had recently rained and all their wares were soaked or worse, looked like they’d been there for a few seasons. I was disappointed that the only appeal of the store was that is was incredibly mismanaged.
I soon felt like Flagstaff was lacking something. I saw it everywhere and I couldn’t shake the feeling. I needed to leave.
I went to Phoenix the following day, more escaping the Mountains than visiting the Valley. But the feeling didn’t leave. I found decay in everything I laid eyes on. I had changed the filter, but not the view.
I couldn’t take it and so I took comfort in the small things I could find. Or I tried.
However, I still can’t describe what I was searching for, or better yet, what was missing.

*

Downtown had this entire wall of graffiti, urban art, street art. Very detailed, delicate murals, everything incoherent to me. It was such a public street, I wondered if it was commissioned. There was some Dr. Suess art behind a liquor store that was obviously encouraged, and I began to lose interest. The murals I gazed upon and snapped up with my point-and-shoot camera were the material that I only dream of, but somehow, if they were done legally, for money even, they lost value to me.
I don’t really understand it. The medium versus the message once again.
But I gazed anyway. The street was quiet, even in broad daylight, so perhaps it was a genuine target for illegal art. I don’t know.
But I turned the corner and discovered some wheatpastes that were so incredibly creepy and offensive that I knew there were unauthorized. Later, I found an abandoned building that someone had tacked up some personal paintings onto the walls. And then the dumpster dripping misspelled tags. Something personal, something authentic.
They made things okay again.
I felt comfortable dreaming again, and I returned to my doors and my schedules and my assigned reading and my pillow.