h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The most touching bit of graffiti I've ever seen was on a wall of a Roman bath house in Bath. I was on a ten day trip to England (I'm from Texas) and just wandering down the street enjoying a beautiful day when a small bit of graffiti grabbed my attention. In simple script, the phrase "I do not want to die" was written on one of the corregations of the wall. I took a picture of it that showed the pleasant street scene in the background. There was a street musician with a small audience down the road a bit and some cheerful looking pedestrians a bit further along. But at some point in time previously some anonymous person had stood where I stood and written "I do not want to die" on this wall. It seemed so lonely to me, so desperate. Of course I do not know if this person had a terminal disease or was just expressing a bit of existential angst. Either way, this wall was this person's confessor.

A similar experience, but on the other side of the spectrum-- Walking down Fourth Avenue in Tucson, where all the artists, homosexuals and bums live, written on the beautiful wall of a very, very expensive house with a lovely garden, one of the few of that kind of house that for some reason is crammed in among the run-down bars and cardboard shanty towns, again in simple script:

"I hate my life."

Interesting that it says almost exactly the opposite but gives you the same sort of desperate, miserable feeling, eh?

-Rivaine

In a photography magazine there was a picture of a car mechanics building. The owner had obviously got hold of a job lot of paint and painted the walls, doors, and roof in one horrid shade that I had never spotted in any garden or film of a jungle I'd ever seen.

On the side of the buliding in foot high letters it just said. "I hate green".

And the tone of the conversation drops like a bronze wombat.
-Rivaine