Seattle, Washington - written Wed., Nov. 12, the 317th day of 2008
Sunrise at 6:38 - sunset at 4:25 - less than ten hours of daylight
Gloomy, cold and stormy - but there’s a full moon somewhere up there.

SMALL SCALE CONSIDERATIONS

If you had been in a certain suburban neighborhood this morning, you would seen an adult male emerge swiftly from a small office building, hurdle a metal guard rail and land lightly on his feet in a parking lot, while punching the air with his fist, and hissing YES! YES! YES!  He might have made even more of a spectacle of himself, but there was a fully-loaded school bus idling in the street right in front of him. Be cool.
(The man was me.)
And just what was going on with the man, you ask?
Been to the dentist. Got a free pass. No cavities. No repairs required. YES!
Blessed are the flossers for they shall have brief moments of great joy.
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As I’m writing this, the radio has just announced the test of the Emergency Alert System. Followed by “eunghhhh. . . . ..eunghhhh . . . . eunghhh.”
(The sound that might be made by a constipated dragon.)
This sound gives me pause.
Under what circumstances would it apply to me?

I ran through a check-list of the possibilities - flood, famine, locusts, nuclear attack, fast-moving glaciers, a plague of toads, bloody rain, man-eating mad cows, an invasion of the Venezuelan army? The world supply of chocolate has dried up? A comet hit the earth? Rampant worm virus? What?

And then there’s the list of stuff the emergency alert system can’t warn of - local earthquakes, aliens from outer space, personal spontaneous combustion, or a sudden and complete reversal of the election results.

Check, check, check. Nothing. It’s comforting to know that the emergency alert system works. The constipated dragon is still on the job.

So it’s been a good day so far. No cavities. Nothing to be alert about.
Where was I?
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Oh, yes. I was going to comment about what appears to be an existential distinction between vertical and horizontal graffiti. You’ve seen the rather bulbous tag art on walls and trains, inside tunnels, and even in places only a human fly could reach. Any flat surface is fair game. But have you ever seen it done? Or done it? Probably not. Me, neither. Mysterious.

But on my walk this afternoon I finally saw it being done. There were two men in hard hats, orange safety vests, carrying surveying gear and some kind of electronic equipment. At the end of a metal rod there was a spray can pointed downward. From time to time one of them pulled a trigger and wrote numbers on the street or painted an arrow or wrote a terse word I could not quite decipher. This is horizontal graffiti. Done during daylight, right out in the open. It seems to be all over the street in my neighborhood because there’s lots of construction going on.

This graffiti, of course, is serious business. The men are locating and marking water lines, electric conduit, high speed cable, sewer pipes, and whatever infrastructure that lies buried below the streets and sidewalks.

The juvenile delinquent still living in the back of my head began to wonder what would happen if he got a spray can and altered some of this stuff. It could cause a whole street to be dug up, don’t you think? Or . . . well the mind boggles with the possibilities.

So I asked the two men. “Does anybody ever mess around with what you’ve marked - like alter it or add to it?” Both men looked at me in surprise. Shook there heads. “Never.” “Not that I ever heard of.” “Some things are just too important to mess with - even whack-ado kids know that.”

Isn’t that amazing?
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Here’s a public Service Announcement:
This would appear to be a sure cure for temporary relief from worry about the crises of the world: Go down to the nearest post office. Drive up to the curbside collection box. Holding a couple of letters and your wallet in your left hand. Drop the letters into the slot. And then your wallet.

To get the full effect of your act, it’s best to do this on a national holiday. At night. When the only people inside the nearest post office are armed security guards. Whatever else you were concerned about, this small act will take your mind off it for several hours, if not days.
I was a witness at the scene of this accident. The lady in the car in front of me was the dropper. She did not handle the situation gracefully. Not at all. In fact she got out of her car and started kicking the postal box while screaming at it. I won’t repeat her language, but it doesn’t really apply to an inert steel container incapable of sexual acts or whose mother was a female dog. And blaming the circumstance on George Bush’s management of the post office is not going to get her wallet back.
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Early in the morning I’m off to Madison, Wisconsin, to participate in the re-dedication of a church designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I will say to the congregation that neither the building nor the architect are really important, but only what their faith inspires them to do in the world.
That which is essential is invisible to the eye.
I suspect they know that.
But having a guy from out of town say it aloud might be useful.

Enough.