I’m the artistic type. I have been so since the moment I could wield a crayon. When mom bought printer paper, she got two packages. One for the printer, one to go in a box with my name on it by my tiny pink table and chair. I remember being 3 years old, wearing my overalls and favorite butterfly hair clips, scribbling my potato people and worm dogs. I papered the wall with drawings in every room I was allowed, but it was never enough. As young as I can accurately remember, I liked to draw on the walls. I called it decorating. I could not be stopped. I even had a special song I’d sing when I decorated. I wonder why I always got caught. Punishment worked for just about any other “bad” act, but not decorating. Couldn’t say how much of my early childhood was spent standing in the corner with a fistful of crayons in my front overall pocket. I liked decorating, and nothing could deter me from my passion. Fast forward a short distance. My parents made a quickly noticeable mistake the day they taught me to write my name. I branded half the things in the house. The bunk beds, the underside of every table, the wall behind the towel rack, and so many books that if you visited my parents house and picked yourself a bedtime story, you’d likely find me somewhere in there, with the i drawn like a lollipop. This habit died hard. Once again, lots of corner therapy. Around the age of 10 I started to partake in quiet vandalism. Tiny corners of paper, scrawled with the date and a simple three-word sentence: “You radically suck.” This was my favorite insult at the time. I thought the word “radical” hilarious, and used it as often and forcefully as possible. I left these messages just about anywhere, taking care that they not be immediately discovered. I hid them in library books, under table legs, behind coffee makers, within stacks of plastic cups, between window panes, and if I could get away with it, tucked inside any accessible baseball cap. I still find this simple act of anarchy slightly funny. I must give little me credit for being so dedicated to the craft. I like to think those messages are still being discovered. Throughout my earlier teen years I liked to travel with post-it notes and a black pen. This I used to scribble sketches of my environment when I found myself bored. The salt shakers at a restaurant, pigeons outside a cafe. They were fine sketches, nothing special, and nothing worth keeping. Utilizing the stickiness of my paper of choice, I left those little drawings anywhere I pleased. I imagine most of them got chucked the second they were discovered. When I was 16, I was gifted a sticker printer. Anything you can draw in black and white can be printed on some durable weatherproof sticker paper, cut to size, and semi-permanently smacked to any surface available. In my wallet I currently have 22 stickers of little mushroom men demanding chaos. These have been placed where they may go unnoticed, like underneath shelves or inside cabinets, but they are there. I like knowing they are there. Downtown is a stop sign on a street corner by a bar and my favorite cafe. This stop sign is periodically replaced, because we just can’t stop putting stickers on the back, and the shitty city doesn’t like that. Currently 4 of my works are stuck up there. A Bigfoot with an AK-47, a bee with a pink flower smoothie, a cat in a sock, and a previously mentioned anarchist mushroom man. They haven’t changed the sign in about 8 months, which is a new record for us. The other sticker vandals have a fantastic sense of humor. My current favorite being a depiction of Adam Sandler as a powerful deity. Chances are your sticker will be buried by a hundred more before the sign is replaced, but that’s ok. You can barely see the sock cat anymore, but the others haven’t been covered up yet. This is what community feels like. If you couldn’t grasp the overall message of this post, vandalism is fun and harms no one. So what if somebody has to change a stupid sign once a year, they’re getting paid. Go forth and vandalize