Peace, Made Over Empty Bottles

My back alley is a perimeter of Bellingham’s downtown business district, something of a corner beyond which few middle class patrons (which in this town means students and senior citizens) will travel – on foot, anyway – to throw down their dollars. The block has its businesses, and for better and for worse, they’re businesses on the margins: on one end of the spectrum is Super Mario’s, Salvadorian food served out of a truck that might actually be the best food in town; and on the other, your average cigarette and beer mart that dishes out sweets and swill.

It’s because of the mart, and the alley’s close remove from downtown, that our back alley is, according to BPD reports in the Cascadia Weekly, “a favorite hangout for people to drink alcohol” (this week’s paper, “Fuzz Buzz,” p. 12). And by “people,” the BPD doesn’t mean college students, who can throw an all-night rager here with no police interference; they mean the people whom Marxists call the “lumpen,” whom liberals call the “homeless,” and whom the BPD themselves call “transients” (a word as appropriate for Bellingham’s college students, I’d say).

Another business is TJ’s, a long-time and now long gone breakfast place whose building has spent the last year being gutted, under some slow process of renovation. The parking lot has been tethered off with metal wire, and for months it’s proximity to downtown has rendered it a bittersweet reminder of what the majority of Bellingham is and always will be under capitalism: concrete with cracks and broken glass – but also autumn leaves with no blowers to blow them away.

In recent days I noticed this piece on the back of the building through the slim brown cracks in the fence between TJ’s and my apartment complex. At first I thought it was just a mess of tags, which would make sense, given the space has been serving overtime as a semi-clandestine watering hole for those whom the combination of alcoholism and no-fixed-address leaves little choice but to risk violating open container laws. But clearly, this isn’t a mess of tags, its something else. Somebody is trying to say something.

Skulls wired to fire – or are those waves of red the petals of a flower? Accompanied by a poem that exalts us to “STAY SANE… BY LETTING GO AND GIVEN OUT.” Not given in, given out: “TO YOUR SOUL. TO YOUR HEART. TO YOUR MIND. PEACE, MADE OVER EMPTY BOTTLES.” And then the tag “– IERUA [or something like it] BE TOLD!”

Not a master piece, by any means, but more beautiful than what is surely in store for this block once the TJs building is done over; and this piece will then surely be whitewashed. The empty bottles will be gone too – not abolished, only displaced to yet another “favorite hangout for people to drink alcohol.” And while websites are as tenuous as anything capitalism has yet produced, maybe, just maybe, my (digital) photographs will hold onto it for some posterity.