Miniature Graffiti (Or: The Smart, Sharp Humor of College Students)

I'll have a longer entry later about what it must be like to be a minor god who graduates with a B.A. in English (yes, you read that right). For now, though, I just need to share this minor gem.

The above picture is a detail from the tilework in and around a urinal in the men's room at a Border's bookstore on Newbury Street in Boston. For the uninitiated, Newbury Street was, at one time, the hip happening place in Boston, kind of like Boston's answer to New's York's Lower East Side. It had cool used clothing shops, and Newbury Comics, which was sort of the jewel in that area's crown.

Alas, with the passage of time and exploding rent prices, the area is now mostly one major chain store after another, followed by one fashion boutique or mega-expensive art gallery. Of the stuff that used to be there, only a few places--such as Newbury Comics, which has become mega successful--survive.

Still, however, you get these occasional small reminders that you're visiting a college town, perhaps the most college populated city in the United States, if not the world. My friend Jeff, who grew up in the nearby suburb of Newton, once told me that there were well over 100 colleges in Boston, and that something like a third of the population of the city, at any given time, is students, which may explain why Boston feels like a ghost town during the summer months.

Any city with that many college students is bound to have subtle reminders that young people are all around, people with energy, people with wit, and, most endearingly, people with way too much time on their hands.

And so it is with this masterpiece of micrograffiti, of which the above photo is just one detail (forgive me for only one photo, but I wasn't going to stand around for a long time and take pictures; the site of a 43 year-old man photographing the walls above a urinal...I'm going to stop writing now...you get the idea). Yes, "Much Ado Agrout Nothing," written with an ultra fine pen, was charming.

But then, as I looked at the wall, the effect was much like those times you look at the ground, see a few ants, and then suddenly realize that no, there are several dozen. No, there are several hundred. No there are several thousand.

It was just like that with this graffiti, because slowly, quite wonderfully, it became clear that whoever did this has added to this cavalcade of puns, perhaps one or two a day. THE GROUT GATSBY. GROUT EXPECTATIONS. GROUT OF AFRICA. SHADOW OF A GROUT. Or perhaps it wasn't just one person; perhaps it became, over time, a communal effort.

I must admit at this point, that some of these--particularly the last one--are ones I'm just thinking up off the top of my head. I don't remember all of them--as I said, I wasn't going to stand in front of a urinal all day long and read graffiti--but I couldn't help but admire the kid who wrote all that stuff.

Because it had to be a kid. Okay, maybe a stunted adolescent such as myself would have done the same thing. I am, after all, the person who came upon a heart surgeon's car with the vanity plate GINADOC and left a note next to it that said "please God, tell me this is not the vanity plate of an OB/GYN."

No, I prefer to think this is the work of some kid, fresh out of college, working at Borders and then going home to the apartment that he shares with, I don't know 20 or 30 guys, considering the rents in any major city, and then, during his free time, writing stories, and thinking up puns to get him through another day of organizing the Romance Section.

It's small survival techniques such as this that make me happy.

It's also the type of thing that provides my mind with something to work on when I'm starting into space, which if often. Ozzy Osbourne's Grout at the Devil. Give me some men who are grout hearted men. Grouting Thomas. Schubert's Grout Quintet. The eeny weensy spider climbed up the water grout. Agrout Schmidt.

Bless that kid.

How many can you think up? I tell you, I'm slow to get on the Twitter bandwagon, but if ever there was a prime candidate for tweets, it would be this. As Vickey said, Twitter is pretty much the digital equivalent of writing on the bathroom wall.