I keep seeing this one graffiti tag all over the place. It isn't the good kind, the guerilla art stuff. I love that stuff. This is the bad kind of graffiti, the kind that gives the muralists a bad name, the defacing kind. The kind that's just somebody scrawling their name rather than creating a piece of work. You see this shit everywhere, I don't know who first thought it would be cool to scrawl your name on a wall or scratch it into the plexiglass windows of the train. I wish all the petty crap-graffiti would go away, and that the backs of all facades in town were covered in graffiti art. The back of a building's false front is a popular place for a tag, since the train goes by at that level plus you don't have to hang off of anything to paint it.

There is this one tag that somebody had to risk major death to paint. As you come into Chicago on the skyway, there's some sort of huge, 8-or-10 story contraption of rusted steel, I don't know what it is. My best guess would be that it's a ship lifter. At any rate, this thing is smack dab in the middle of the industrial hell that spans from southern Chicago all the way to beautiful Gary, Indiana. Somebody trekked in the middle of the night deep into this jungle, climbed those ten stories, and hung off the top to paint "The Wolf Pack". Well, the tag worked on me. I am firmly convinced that the Wolf Pack is full of baaaad motherfuckers.

But this one, this one I see everywhere, it's always in the oddest of places. Like inside an I-beam under an overpass, or on the side of a "Don't Walk" sign. It's not done very well at all, looks like little kid handwriting. It's just a name:

"Jimmy Carter"

Looks like a certain ex-president is getting a little bored with being a diplomat.