Hi 👋

I have a memory from childhood of spending time at a lake house with my parents. We rented it, this was long before AirBnB. It was a cool A frame house with a staircase that went right down to a nice dock with a pontoon boat that we could use. I always remembered it as "Hike Lake" but I had no real memory of where exactly it was. I knew it was in southern Michigan somewhere, but that was about it. And it turns out searching the web for "hike lake michigan" or a million variations of that was extremely unhelpful.

Anyway, after a fruitless search I finally suspected that it must have had some odd spelling variation, so I started searching for a bunch of different spellings and eventually found it.

I've had this map open in a tab for a week and it felt like some important comment was on the tip of my tongue. Even with what feels like the entirety of human knowledge only a few clicks/taps away, there remain things that are hard to find. I couldn't remember the actual name, and the details I could remember made it difficult to search for.

There are other things like this, things I remember but that I can't find any trace of on the internet because I don't remember the right search terms.

I'm going to end this post before I end up down some rabbit hole about human knowledge and technology.

Long Live Evil by Sarah Reese Brennan | ★★★★☆

This book attempts to achieve a delicate balance between cheeky and self-serious and mostly succeeds. Ostensibly an "adult" novel from a reliable YA author, this had the flavor of YA with just a few shakes from the spice tin. I was far more engaged with the second half than the first, which I think is hard to pull off with a concept story like this. The ending hit the right balance of closure with the promise of more to come. I'll definitely keep an eye out for the next in the series.

Check out Long Live Evil by Sarah Reese Brennan.

One of my regular running routes takes me along the access road for a local canal. It's a public right-of-way as well as a road regularly used by the Central Oregon Irrigation District.¹

The canal itself passes under a highway, and the access road passes under through its own little tunnel, barely wide enough for a truck to pass through, but perfect for pedestrian traffic. It's maybe a hundred feet long. Concrete and blacktop. Adequate drainage. Utilitarian.

An overview of the COID canal tunnel under the Bend Parkway, facing east.

But what it unexpectadly offers is a huge, secluded concrete canvas for local taggers and graffiti artists. And they are locked in a constant struggle with COID, who apparently prefer the walls to be grayish tan at all times. Any graffito here is ephemeral, destined to be painted over by the district within a week or two of appearing. ²

Spray painting these walls is illegal, make no mistake. But places like this are destined to be gallaries for punks and weirdos, and maybe we should allow a little room in our society for outsider art. Just please don't tag my garage door.

I'm not an art critic and especially not a graffiti critic. Many of the marks I've seen are amateur, rudimentary, perhaps created in haste and with little to say. But I've documented many of them.

Here are my favorites.³ I'll post more when I get 'em.

Captured March 19, 2021

Captured March 19, 2021

Captured October 27, 2021

Captured July 20, 2022

Captured August 14, 2023

Captured May 22, 2025

Captured August 7, 2022

Captured November 8, 2021

Captured August 14, 2023

Captured July 20, 2022

Captured August 7, 2022

Captured July 20, 2022

Captured May 7, 2023

Captured June 3, 2025

Captured July 4, 2022

Captured August 7, 2022

Graffiti can be a wonderful ongoing conversation between both artist and cleanup crew.

Captured July 20, 2022

Captured May 19, 2024