Byline: Burning Nuances
It stands to reason that postcards generally hold better experiences than the places they depict. Selling ideals is not the highest of the arts and marketing memories is less science than swindle.
But scribbling on the back of reproduced photographs, applying postage and anticipating the received smiles is more about humanity than art or science. Postcards in that respect never lose their charm and there is something very charismatic about turning limitations into virtues.
So it is with tags on the street. Gestures and colors have rhythms of their own. And what is a tag if nothing but gesture and color or lack thereof?
Rhythm always disguises itself as communication. Humans, complex concentrations of carbon that we are, know the game, play the field and continue to remember, imagine and reason within a meter forced upon us or one we force upon others.
It takes as much effort to decide to do nothing as to do something. Beyond that, inertia and energy are taxed accordingly. Try as we may to make every word lose a sense of its vulgarity, karma assures accountability for the words we use, the way we feel and for any trains of thought that go running off the track.
If the neutrality of this article is not disputed, it needs to be, for every word unsaid has potential and every sentence unissued has distant possibilities. Just as there's a fine line between building a tolerance and gaining a dependence, solving puzzles, internal and external, requires the intelligence to know what to say, what not to say and when to communicate.
Becoming the patron saint of spray paint at least in your own neighborhood solves as many problems as it brings. Fitting solutions where problems don't exist is the antithesis of production. And when solutions become ethical decisions as they often do, the nuances loosen any solvency.
There may be great gradation between joy and disgust depending on your point of view, but whenever I see a tag in the rundown part of town, I feel a sense of freedom and hope. I smile at the thought of individuals defiant for no cause other than their own, for their own sense of arrival or escape.
Kind of like getting a postcard in the mail.
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