I think I know what good street art is now. It is a celebration. Whereas graffiti is like a dark room that smells of stale bong water. There is a lot in between though. I wasn’t going to go into too much detail about this. I actually wanted to tell a story of meeting a young graffiti artist in the mid nineties and going to the freight yards every sunday. It was strange because the guy was a few years younger than me and his sister was my age. I never told him but his mother had a brief fling with my Dad when he was divorced. It was strange we crossed paths. He got out of graffiti and went to study computer science. He introduced me to Linux and I picked it up using it for decades. I still use it now, finding it very reliable and easy to use. It is flexible and once you set it up it just works.

As for graffiti it is like the opposite of a celebration. It is like a major downer but it has those moments of fun and light heartedness also. It was like a few weeks ago. I painted two graffiti pieces. One was like a magic crystal of gold and subtle texture yet slightly dark. The other a kind of slick colour field moment in graffiti form. They were both quite different. Maybe the second was more like a celebration and the first a beautiful melancholy thought piece? I suppose not everyone is celebrating. A lot of guys are just getting more and more angry. They want to retaliate. They want to crash the party. They see all of these people having a great time and can’t wait to come down as a wall of violence. Some graffiti I was doing in 2015 to me was like a kind of ode to rave parties. Lines of colour exploding in all directions like lasers and a light show. Sometimes melancholy creeps in. Violence becomes their fearful cry as the world shuts them out. It is a change that as beautiful as it looks is someone else’s end.

Yet with each ending there are new beginnings with forced beauty that is like a bright light cutting through a dark room. The party was just getting bigger and bigger as the world became darker and darker. The individual stories of overcoming adversity were not as convincing because the story was never allowed to have a tranquil ending. It was just what it was. A mask that artists painted about poking fun at these adversaries. They could never be trusted. Especially with money. Those two faced drunkards that hurled insults and had broken egos would never be allowed in. Their way was barred by their transgressions. Not even God could forgive them. Those with money wanted parties and celebrations and positivity. I know of this because I too was at one stage hurling drunken insults and feeling broken. Then I quit alcohol ten years ago and wished I could take back my own transgressions, still only to still have graffiti as an expression. Yet I mellowed out, had a family and worked. You may never take back the past but as you go into the future let yourself be pleasantly surprised by new paths to take.