Yep, yep, yep

In my intermittently continuing quest to bring you the unusual... and failing...

After years of riding the train to work through some of the more colorful areas of Southern California, I gained a reasonable sense of the sorts of subject matter expressed in the graffiti that adorns the walls and buildings along the train route. Some was fairly artistic, much seemed to mark gang territory, but there didn't seem to be anything that really stood out.

Then one day, months back, I passed a spot in South Central, just before the Slauson station on the Blue Line, that I found interesting. It was something that years of passing by led me to consider noteworthy. On more than one occasion I thought, I should take a picture of that and post it on the blahg, but I kept forgetting to get my camera ready in time when the train would get to that location (just north of Gage Ave.).

Months of seeing it, day after day, as the train passed and making a mental note to try to remember the next time and failing all came to an end a little over a few weeks ago. I got my camera ready in plenty of time. I imagine the person sitting next to me thought it odd, that I'd be waiting to shoot a photo in an area that was not, by any conventional standards, all that picturesque. Nonetheless, I was quite pleased with myself for remembering and being ready.

The location approached. My camera was in hand and pointed out the window, my finger on the shutter button. It was a beautiful sunny day, with good mid-morning light.

And...

What I was shooting was that text partially covered by a tarp.


As shown above, I still took the photo.

You may be able to discern the word if you look close enough, but the graffiti on the back of a wall, the subject of the picture that I had intended to photograph for so long, was too obscured to be an effective shot. Perhaps you can make it out from the bottom half of the letters what the unusually political message is (at least, relative to what most of the other graffiti says), but otherwise the opportunity was ruined.

That, in a nutshell, is what I've come to expect out of life.