Graffiti

September 27th, 2025

Around the Waldorf school on Brady Street there is always some graffiti scribbled on buildings and signs. In the bathrooms of some of the coffee shops on the street there is often more writing than there is blank space on the walls. Sometimes, there is even graffiti written on top of other graffiti. The graffiti in the neighborhood near Asher’s school is not excessive, but it’s always popping up no matter how many times the messages or drawings are erased or painted over. After a while, the words or symbols become invisible to the people passing by them. That is, unless they are somehow thought provoking in an unusual way.

Occasionally, graffiti can be thoughtful and literate. I took a piss in a bathroom where somebody had taken the time to write down a quote by Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird. It was about what it means to be brave. They wrote:

“The true meaning of courage is not whether or not you are afraid. It is whether or not you do it anyway.”

I was impressed by that.

Most graffiti are boring. Cryptic gang symbols are of interest to only a small subset of people. To me, and probably to many other folks, the images mean nothing. I have a Catholic Worker friend who told me once that national flags are just glorified gang symbols. I think he’s right. A flag is a kind of graffiti. It sends a message or tries to do so. For some individuals a flag may have deep emotional meaning, but for others it’s just a colorful rag flapping in the breeze. A couple houses in the area fly Palestinian flags. Those particular forms of graffiti are obviously important to the residents of the home, but they may offend or signify nothing to the person walking underneath them. An American flag can have the same effect.

Sometimes graffiti is political in nature. On the Brady Street bridge protesters love to write things on concrete with colored chalk. They sometimes write, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” I have also seen the statement, “Israel: your victim card has expired.” The slogans are eye-catching, but they probably only interest the people who already agree with what is written. The comments in chalk are mercifully temporary. A good rain erases it all and cleans the slate for the next author.

Graffiti can have religious messages. “Jesus saves” is an example of that. I have seen entire verses from the Bible written on the sidewalk. This kind of graffiti can be inspiring, or it can be very negative. Or it can be both, depending on views of the person reading the message.

Graffiti is too often obscene. That seems to be part of our culture. There was a time when if somebody wrote the word “fuck”, it grabbed the attention of the observer. That is no longer true. I, at least, am too jaded to give that sort of thing a second look.

There is one unique specimen of graffiti that I see every time I pick up Asher from school. All it says is,

“Entropy will triumph!”

That always makes me smile. It reads like a radical manifesto from a science nerd. Of course, the statement is true. In the physical world, things tend to move from order to disorder. This is not true in every case, but in the end the universe will probably suffer heat death, a state where there is only thermal energy and there is total disorder. The universe won’t go out with a bang. It won’t even go out with a whimper. So, the person who used a Sharpie to scrawl this message obviously knows something of thermodynamics, and they also have a dry sense of humor.

Thermodynamics has three basic laws:

The first law, also known as the law of conservation of energy, states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another.

The second law states that the total energy of an isolated system can never decrease over time.  

The third law states that as the temperature of a system approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a perfect crystal approaches a constant minimum. This law implies that it is impossible to reach absolute zero in a finite number of steps, and it proves insight unto the behavior of systems at very low temperature.

(Note: these laws were found in Wikipedia).

What does all this mean? I once found a version of the three laws that was translated into layman’s terms. It said,

1. You can’t win.
2. You can’t break even.
3. You can’t quit the game.

That pretty much is what the graffiti artist was saying. I like that.