Part 11 Monday Vandal

Weekends bring the doodles out of school workbooks and onto walls and inner streets of the subway system, like dancers caged Monday through Friday. Cans of paint to describe love, love lost, and the lost in squiggly, often curiously misspelled rants. There’s something so sexy about the thrill of being a miscreant, a sudden lawlessness. Suited and bow-tied otherwise, selling insurance on the weekdays, hurrying art, watching out for the transit cops on Saturday nights. Scrunching cheap beer cans, pissing on the tracks. Like games from a lost and loved childhood. Cops and robbers, disguised codes with added syllables for imaginary secret societies and haunted houses. 

The jangles of the underground subway light up and scatter nightly bats and other mammals on a Monday, bottlenecking a third of each species on any good bloody morning, only to be replaced by more incestuous fucking in under a week. Scurrying, picking. From a distance, it seems like the already fluid graffiti could move in an oxycodone sluggishness.

But soon, the South Eastern Pennsylvania Transport Authority brings out another type of vandal – to reverse engineer weekend art. Armed with chunky one-size belts, jiggling with cans of paint remover and cleaning supplies, and pressure cleaners in tail. Scrubbing expertly, reducing potential treasure maps, odes, rants, and love songs to formless color on cloth. No one will ever know. No one will ever miss.

Like washed smashed track-kill animals.