dear summer,

i look forward to finally getting to spend some quality time with you.

let's rendezvous tonight, down the cape. me and you and friends and fam and knotty pines and beaches. sounds like fun, don't?

i promise to take better pictures of you this year.

i've even gone and signed up with flickr.

even better, i got a new camera to help with the task and i tried it out a couple days ago, with good results. such as this fancy shot of some eggplants:



or this one of a sheep with a suspicious resemblance to some other sheeps i know:



best so far, though, are the shots i took of my favorite neighborhood graffiti bridge. you have to walk these tracks to get there:



as you approach the bridge, the tracks reveal signs of eager writers:



i'm still mastering the flash cube (though, it's no longer a cube, izzit?), so i apologize for the uneven lighting:



or the lack of context, so let's step back a moment:



and then come in close:



i have to admit, i really like close-ups (watch out, sasha):







especially when they reveal the details,



that contribute so crucially to the overall picture:



the best part about my friendly neighborhood graffiti bridge, though, is that it's clearly got layers and layers of paint on it--generations of writers making the canvas constantly new.

one curiosity, and an old one at that, is the collection of pre-graf nail-tags on the tracks leading up to the bridge. not the most artful tags you've ever seen, but kind of inventive all the same. in some cases, these works clearly took some time (and some nails).

here's some dude called DIMMY representing:



and then there's J.O.M:



DIMMY and J.O.M. musta been boys:



here's MIKE's contribution:



then there's one by JOE MEKO, who also gives us a date, sept 19, 1969:



finding the one above was kind of a treat for me, for i remember joe as a friend of my father. everyone called joe "head" or "header" (pronounced, headah, of course). i got the impression the nickname was actually due to the shape of his head (which was slightly, though not obscenely, oblong). thus, his nickname differed from, say, another guy who everyone called "fish." although i suspect now that the name had more to do with his ability to down a beer, when i asked as a kid why they called him fish, i was told, "because he swims like a rock."

MEKO's track from afar:



and from very close:



of course, being good boys, even M.O.M. gets a shout:



although many of these tags, being--um--tough as nails, have weathered the elements rather well for over thirty years, time has not been so kind to all of them:





speaking of time, it's time for me to get my ass off this computer and on the road.

see you soon, summer.

(see the rest of y'all sometime next week.)