Winter in Olympia
The town was destitute. Miller had sold its plant, the hippies were too busy protesting American imperialism to notice that the local economy was buckling, and the homeless population was swelling like fetid water threatening to spill over the brim of the chipped and mildewed porcelain edifice of the downtown.
Nobody knew where they came from – as a whole, they never really came from anywhere – they were non-entities drifting from the stuffy abscesses of the Midwest and into our stoned state’s capitol like flecks of dust, out of nowhere, into your eye.
I mention them because, as things turned out on this numbing February afternoon, I was admiring their handiwork spattered over a mural off of State Ave – they had really gone out of their way, taken their time. This went beyond the abandoned clothes laced with syringes, the torn paper bags, the broken glass, and the occasional pile of junkie vomit.
“That’s shirt art.” said one of my comrades, gesturing toward the crusty filth which caked and obscured a ridiculously-colorful mural. My mind immediately produced the image of one of the jabbering hobos crudely removing a fistful of feces from his stained coveralls and unleashing his pièce de résistance, savagely grinning as he expressed himself over the mural’s imagery of smiling people and cloudless skies.
Though I was taken aback by its form, I had to agree with the shit art’s content and its underlying statement.
“They do that in jails and prisons, I hear.” said J******, pulling his knit wool cap down over his ears.
I wondered if anyone else suspected Olympia, Washington to be a penal colony just now; some labored (like myself) at menial dead-end jobs, others found themselves laid off from the menial jobs they knew, still others mumbled as they wandered the streets and attempted to find some warmth for their hands by digging deep into their pockets, keeping an eye out for police cruisers.
We had all – at one time or another – been to solitary places. We had all been stuck in dismal little rooms, feeling the full weight of the uncertain future, with no one to tell about it. I knew that this day could have yielded the latter and felt inwardly relieved that I had escaped the gravity of my entropic internal dialog.
