I live in a fairly sleepy part of Queens, and sometimes it seems like I seldom make an effort to travel very far outside the bounds of the neighborhood. Any kind of restaurant you could want is within walking distance of my apartment, my gym is a few short blocks away, the grocery store even closer. Some would probably find this level of convenience a little suffocating. I find it helpful, as I grew up in a typical Texas suburb stacked with stroads and sidelined by strip malls in just about every direction. I find it suffocating when you can drive through endless suburbs, each of which looking more or less like the last one, only separated by mildly variating socioeconomic factors, until your car runs out of gas.
This city conditions people to be the stereotypical American ideal of a “loser”, in that unless you are already very fabulously wealthy or are extremely lucky, you will not drive a car or own property. These are the two things with which folks in the rest of this country assert their individuality. You don’t own a car and you terminally rent a one bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood? You take public transit? What a fucking loser. Sometimes I think people here completely miss that.
I take my personal loserdom one step further: I have a tedency to be somewhat of a shut-in. Besides the grocery store, my daily gym trip, and the occasional trip to a restaurant or bar in my neighborhood, I very rarely leave my apartment if my feet are not forced to move in order to keep an obligation I made to someone else (vet visits for my cat notwithstanding).
In an effort to deter the formation of a blood clot that will eventually dislodge itself and stop my heart because I didn’t go anywhere, or perhaps just to make myself feel like I went somewhere, I’ve taken up daily outdoor walks. They’ve proven beneficial, at least in that I don’t feel like a worthless sack of shit for a few short minutes after I’ve returned home. I’m trying not to feel like that anyway, but it’s terminally a work-in-progress that I hope to be able to call “Done” one day (in as much as you can ever be “Done” with a task like that).
When I’m out and around in the city, I’ve always been interested in seeing what is scrawled on the concrete or any other spare piece of visual real estate, of which there is plenty. You might call this graffiti (I wouldn’t), you definitely wouldn’t call it “street art” (I could give a fuck about that), but in any case, I like seeing the messages that the adolescent, the terminally so, and the flat out mentally unwell leave for anyone else to see. Some of my favorites include:
IT'S HERE....GOD X2
Polytheism at it’s finest.
NYPD = KKK = IDF
FREE PALENSTINE
Those are certainly all acronyms and agencies.
EAT.
PRAY.
QUEEF.
This last one is my personal favorite. On one of my recent walks, I came upon one of these scribbles that gave me a moment of pause:
BUDDS NOT BOMBS
Two D’s and all.
Now, I smoked my fair share of weed in my teens and 20s. I remember back when it was illegal in every single state in the US. You’d get goaded into the back seat of some sketchy looking suburban, pressed to spend a little more than you were originally thinking, and end up with a sackful of stems and seeds that you’d graciously take back to your friends after paying your tithing bowl to your dealer.
This Bush-era experience of buying weed frequently contraindicated with a misguided sense that, if only weed were legalized, everything would automatically be fixed. People’s depressions and anxieties would be leveled out, their sense of zest would be reinvigorated, sex lives would improve, compassion and empathy for their fellow neighbor would skyrocket, the for-profit prison system would be summarily demolished and replaced with hypernormalized local agriculture co-operatives that solve the problem of hunger and cause homeless recidivism rates to plummet as we all get honorary doctorates in political science and collectively determine that a combination of democratic socialism and a libertarian view towards drug use and other social issues are the optimal way forward. We take this newfound sense of clarity and dismantle the military industrial complex, ending the obviously illegal and unjust wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Everything would be right in the country. We could finally take hold of that uniquely unified feeling we all collectively experienced in the days following 9/11 and make that the new baseline. A New America with New Ideals. In short:
BUDDS NOT BOMBS
I wonder what kind of person still believes this enough to scrawl it out on a utility pole in Queens in 2024 (it looked fairly fresh). It harkens back to the late 90s era Wired Magazine-reading, Doug Rushkoff-idolizing Bay Area tweed jacket -wearing motherfucker who thinks we can solve all of the country’s problems with a healthy dose of “The Net” and little bit of “kind bud”. Is that guy still out here? Did he strike big on some website during the DotCom Bubble that sold enough air fresheners to get bought out by Yahoo? And now he’s just walking around expressing the same worldview that inadvertently made him a shit ton of money with nothing but a marketing degree and good timing? Has he just had his head buried in the sand, ignoring the steadfast decline of political and social discourse of the past decade because it all worked out for him? Has he not realized that weed is basically legal in this country, and we’re all worse off, whether coincidentally or not?
In reality, BUDDS NOT BOMBS
was probably scribbled by some 14 year old who
hasn’t yet had their idealism absolutely shattered by the realities of modern
adulthood. They haven’t fucked over others and been fucked over dozens of times
over, been broke enough to need to go to the food pantry, run their car on hopes
and dreams, lost all faith in their neighbors, watched their peers wither away
on alcohol and drug habits, or pushed out everyone who tries to get close yet.
They think they can make a difference in the world, and they think their three
step plan of “legalize drugs, get rid of the military, make college free” won’t
have repercussions.
I’m trying to mold myself somewhere in the middle of these two schmucks. Young and hopeful enough to think that maybe we can figure it all out, but not old and dumb enough to never realize that my dumbass ideas from 25 years ago aren’t any good to anyone today.
Happy Fourth. Budds Not Bombs.