November 28, 2023: Irregular Verbs -- I paint, you deface....

SOLVE had a city-wide cleanup this morning, and I went down to Peace Park, between the Convention Center, the Steel Bridge, and the Esplanade. I drive by it weekly, but have never thought about getting there on foot. It’s a sweet little corner  

I thought the SOLVE event would just be the usual trash cleanup, but it turned out there was an option to paint over graffiti, and I went for that instead. Sign me up!

I know the graffiti painters will be right back at it, likely tonight. I know that I was, essentially, just preparing a fresh canvas for them. I don’t like graffiti, I do think most of it is just vandalism, and I wish they’d knock it off.   

And yet for all that, I couldn’t get depressed over the absurdity of our efforts. I was content to create a moment of visual calm, however temporary. 

Maybe it was because my friend’s mom, a nice lady I’ve known since I was twelve, is in her last days, and I was thinking of her. Somehow, moping over a voluntary-yet-Sisyphean task seemed like the waste of a nice day.

Or maybe it was because I couldn’t help but think that Hey, *I* get to paint in my nice studio, and some of what I do is pretty awful, but I’m well-off, whereas the graffiti kids likely don’t have a studio option. I don’t know. For whatever reason, I wasn’t feeling sour.

I stopped on my way out to applaud the guy who was painting the entire overpass. It looked so nice. He was philosophical, too. He said, ‘Yeah, some of this stuff is pretty vile, but then some of it is surprisingly heartfelt. One guy wrote about his grandmother. It was kindof touching.”

I think to do a SOLVE cleanup, you need a particular mindset, something along the lines of “Oh, well, it doesn’t HURT to make a small improvement, right?”

The man who runs the Tall Tree Coffee cart brought it down to where we were working, and gave us all coffee, for free. Someone else brought us a bunch of caprese sandwiches on ciabatta. The sun was out. I walked most of the way back to my car along the river, and there was not so much as a candy wrapper, thanks to the trash cleanup team.

Then I went to my studio, and painted a really unfortunate portrait of a chicken, which didn’t hurt anybody.