Advice, Ideas and Identity in Graffiti

I was sitting on the thrown reading the graffiti in a cafe on Valencia in San Francisco, and I was struck with amusement, enjoying the little nuggets of advice people had written. I was tickled by the importance of these sentences, their authors must have felt so strongly about them and so I dove in.



First I read a bit of light advice, "stay classy San Fran" next, the slightly bolder, "Eat an 8th of mushrooms with a close friend in a safe environment. Really."



And then, "go back to Europe." I suddenly thought, what is this? Is this a slur against immigrants? I prefer to assume not. Is this some sort of message for me to go back to Europe. I just came from Europe...

Obviously, this person didn't have me in mind. And yet I feel certain we have a psychological tendency to interpret things as applicable and relative to ourselves. But when it comes to open-ended advice that strangers write in bathrooms, what are the odds that someone will read it and feel like it was written precisely for them, precisely at that time? What are the odds that someone will suddenly be swayed by this guerrilla advice-giving technique from an unidentified stranger?



Looking at everything on the door I noticed that one person had tagged the door many, many times and I thought about what this person was trying to achieve by writing their name over and over. Is there a sense of ownership that comes out of tagging? Or is it an attempt to assert one's existence, a meager act of rebellion against our inevitable mortality by indelibly recording one's name in this public, subversive way? And to add to it all, tagging is also relatively anonymous. This person must not be searching for any public recognition. This fascinated me briefly. And then I stepped out of the toilet and went on with my day.