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Tuesday
November 15, 2005

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guerilla art,
                                fremont, seattle Three days a week, I wake up around 7 a.m., drink a glass of water, meditate on the good luck and luxury of it. I feel it go down and into my stomach, then start diffusing to all the thirsty cells in my body. It's like savoring a deep breath. I like the way water fills the shape of the glass and wonder what shape it takes when it joins me. Ahhh....

Then it's off to work, out the door at 7:45 by the oven clock, onto my bicycle for the breakneck ride down 39th street to the Burke-Gilman Trail--Seattle's 17+mile lakeside bike path. It's an easy commute to the RE Store just 2 or 3 miles away. I read the sky to get a sense of the day's weather, nod to passing cyclists, wonder if bird populations are really diminshing or whether it's just me.

Today I got to work, put my steel-toe boots on, loaded my tools on the truck, then was told I could go home to work on www.re-store.org. (I didn't design it but I do help keeping it current.) It was a nice ride back. The sun was shining. I sat upright on the bike, hands in pockets, enjoying the ride while it lasted. I stopped at the PCC for breakfast and other goodies, munched peanutbutter covered pretzels as I pushed my bike up the hill--sometimes I prefer walking.
information school
                                library discard

 
I paused to photograph this graffiti on a sidewalk electric box. Really fine art. The stencil with drop shadow is subtly done. The laminated C-note might have been real--it would have been wrong to peel it--but my guess is it's a printout or color copy. The days are numbered text echoes the opening of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, but I'm guessing the philosophies behind the statements are radically opposed.

While rerereading Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, I came across a mention of Clarence Day's This Simian World, so I used some of my quarterly amazon.com kickback to order  a 1936 cloth-bound edition from a dealer in Maryland for $1. It was so cheap because it was a library copy stamped and discarded by the ARMED FORCES INFORMATION SCHOOL LIBRARY. The GOVERNMENT/CANCELLED stamp overlay seemed to echo the graffiti's prediction.

The book itself is a darkly humorous appraisal of the human race which acts as a link between Mark Twain's later stories and Kurt Vonnegut's anthropology-influenced novels Galapagos and Cat's Cradle. It's a tidy little book and I wonder what those Information Officers in training got out of it.