I have deduced that in the pantheon of bathroom truck stops, port-o-potties, bar bathrooms, office bathrooms, and highway rest stops, the best graffiti is found in university libraries.
Library bathroom graffiti reads like sonnets, scribbled in pencil or magic marker, the stream of conscious for the stool-releasing studier.
Before there were blogs, there was bathroom graffiti.*
I myself was the author of many contemplative musings in the handicapped stall on the sixth floor of my university library.
Graffiti can be found on any stall wall. But the handicapped stall is like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a vast canvas of prefabricated metal for sitting shitters to heroically transcribe sleep-deprived, caffeine, and adderall-induced diatribes.
Some of the best political debates I've ever read were found just above the toilet paper roll--opinions scrawled in barely legible writing. In library bathrooms entire belief structures are painstakingly hashed out over the course of a single bowel movement.
And the thrill of getting into a graffiti discussion kept me coming back to the same stall time and again. People always had an answer, an addition, or an argument to add, the anonymity an emboldened seductress of honesty.
The structure of library bathroom graffiti is laid out like a term paper, complete with a thesis, commentary, and the concrete details to back it up.
Sometimes Greek letters or sophomoric trash talking would appear in a library stall, but never on par with the kind of lewd drawings and innuendos found in bar and truck stop bathrooms. In university libraries, the discourse always rose above blow job solicitations, prank numbers attached to admitted harlots, petty shit talking, and the veiny penis drawings that seem to be so prevalent in highway rest stops.
And because most local gang members don't frequent the library, never is a particular stall or entire bathroom ever claimed as gang turf in the street calligraphy that normally lays claim to box cars, light posts, fences and other arbitrary objects claimed by gangs--who fights over rusted Santa Fe line box cars, anyway?
But at the start of each summer the stall walls are wiped clean by a battalion of custodians, readying the walls for another year of academic dumpers ready to hash out the worlds problems in between grunting, sweating, courtesy flushing, and wiping.
There is no card catalog for the annals of bathroom graffiti lost every year to a polished stall wall.
But that is okay, because the world is never in short supply of bathroom graffiti philosophers--of which the upper crust find an audience in the confines of library bathrooms across the globe.
*Bathroom Graffiti went on the Maury Povich show to get a DNA test, and it was found that Cave Drawings is in fact the father, not Ancient Tablets, as was previously assumed.
Technorati Tags:
RSS Feeds
12 Comments
Wanna comment? Signup!
JaneCopland
tiburonbite
JaneCopland
blitzhund
gabrielle
bgkimzey
anneliese
ShawnG
Killer
pjm
brad
MitchHexx
Wanna comment? Signup!