Spain is florid with graffiti. It’s on the walls along the railroad tracks of course, but also on the trains, even encroaching on the windows. At the station in our little beachside town the tunnel under the tracks was completely covered with tags and messages: All police are bastards, Welcome to Altaganja.

What a luxury it is to sit before the blank screen, with nothing to write, the front door open and the sound of a lawnmower in the distance. Nothing to do in the future but swim in the pool and bob for hours in the gentle waves of the Mediterranean.

I recognized the streets, the walls, the contours of town from Google Maps. Everything was in place. As we crossed the bridge over the tracks I looked for something—anything—unexpected. Maybe the blotchy pattern of plaster on the wall of the building down there. But it was only a matter of time before Google cataloged that as well. When will their project be complete? When every paint chip, every cobweb, every blade of glass is documented—and its growth and decay in real time as well. Then the universe will finally be demystified and we can all go back to sleep.

Drip Cock

There was some new graffiti at the elevated Fourth Avenue stop last Thursday, as Jackie and I rode into the City. Two words on a concrete abutment: DRIP COCK. I processed it as you do any street speech: I noted its vulgarity, its absurdity, also its admirable conciseness. It's a striking phrase, the kind that makes for a good band name. Drip Cock. One-two punch.

It's also interesting that it isn't COCK DRIP. Not just interesting—important. "Cock drip" is mundane; offensive but only in a tedious, juvenile way. By swapping the words, the writer forces us to engage. Maybe it's someone's tag—that'd be great.

Yo yo, guess who hit Fourth Avenue da other day?! Drip Cock, yo!

What kind of cock? Drip cock.

But I’m overthinking already. You sense that the writer has no particular meaning in mind, and this makes the phrase yet more powerful. Is it a command? Or a description? Better not to say. Better not to know. The words inhabit the wonderful and scary world of nonsense.

On the Manhattan side a dishevelled woman stumbled drunkenly on the corner of 17th and Eighth. She appeared to be looking for the wall to orient herself in the universe. Not finding it. Loaded at 9 o’clock on a Thursday morning.

On Friday night, at the Philharmonic concert in Prospect Park, I lay down and watched a light move bizarrely in the sky. Blinking erratically too. Why isn’t this a UFO?, I thought numbly. Space aliens, abduction and experimentation. The whole nine. Then I noticed it wasn’t the light that was moving, it was the clouds.

The corners of the streets in Paris are marked with a variety of graffiti tags, glyphs and icons, some affixed, some stenciled, some painted freehand. They look like an array of medals on a military man, or more likely an arrangement of runes. There’s a deliberate quality to them, as though this illicit urban project, begun in a frenzy of outrage and audacity forty years ago, had now settled into some calm, methodical phase 2.

We walked along the canal and two painters were creating a vast mural, the mist from their spray cans blowing into the faces of dogs and babies, wherever the wind might carry it.

There's a graffiti artist in my neighborhood whose tag is great. It's a cartoon of a boy walking, head-on, his right knee bent back and the shoe vertical, his left foot forward; his right arm lifted and the fingers splayed in a bursting wave. The boy's mouth is a wide, rectangular grid of teeth superimposed on his round face – the borders of the mouth are actually outside the borders of the face. He's got a zooey expression and abstract, spiky hair. The image is joyous, positive, affirmative somehow, yet also faintly disquieting (that mouth!). The artist sometimes draws a suggestion of a sidewalk beneath the boy's feet, and usually a "© 2002."

He also sometimes refers to the surroundings in his tags: I see them a lot in the subway, drawn in the white space of an airline poster that mentions foreign cities and seems to change cities from week to week. When the poster said Paris he drew an Eiffel Tower behind the boy and, weirdly, a landscape of snow-covered mountains in the distance. When it said Rome he drew the leaning tower of Pisa.

He also sometimes incorporates messages. On another poster in the subway he drew the tag and these words above it: REGAIN CONSCIOUSNESS Early in the morning, underground, waiting for the train, I can't help but perceive this as something like a divine command.