The mush-up

Two consecutive weekends away from the Nine-One-Four -- and the most annoying fact that the days are getting glaringly shorter -- have turned my brain to mush. I stare at this blog, the house, my desk at work, the Back Forty, and nine blocks away, When Pigs Fly Farm, and don't know where to start.

So I don't.

I'm a big fan of The Path of Least Resistance.

So today I give you a Bermtopian Mush-up: Random images from the last couple weeks, courtesy (for the most part) of my cell phone and Instagram. Welcome to the jungle my brain:

The suckiest airport terminal in the world: Commuter Alaska@PDX. 

Isn't it bad enough you have to fly in a plane with propellers?

The dude abides. . . with a telephone wire going through his head

Hops still life

Rogue chickens on the South Hill. I'm now sleeping with one eye open at night.

The hops operation

The Office: Our videographer. . . and this is one of his more normal moments

Damn straight, it is

Cousins in a truck

Harrah, Washington: I love ghost signs.

I grew these!

Almost makes up for the suckiest airport terminal in the world.

 Almost.

Ghost signs

I love ghost signs.

Ever since I was a little kid.

And then some years ago I found out
they actually had a name. And that people blog about them! Who knew.

These old hand-painted advertisements and company names, now chipped, faded and scaling off the bricks they were painted on, are a portal into the past – a glimpse at our cities' former simplicity and grandeur. I think ghost signs lend a gentility, a gracefulness, to city life.

The art form reached its zenith in the decades leading into the Great Depression. The itinerant sign artists were called "wall dogs." And now they simply fade away.

Some ghost signs sprawl across the sides of buildings.

There are relatively tiny ones, too, obscured by now-mature landscaping and dumpsters.


And many compete with 21st century "art."


In their heyday, I bet ghost signs were glorious to look at. They still are.


That is, until we paint, plaster and brick over them. Before we replace them with the garish visual monsters made of vinyl, metal and wood we call billboards. And before we tear down their buildings to make way for edgy, angular, neon high rises. Nobody hand paints art on a high rise.

I believe in ghosts. Do you?