Foodie = Lazy English

Originally published on Tumblr.

Sometimes you run across graffiti that leaves you scratching your head. This one falls into that category.

I saw it the day I decided not to publish a blog post that a colleague promised me would offend any Englishman who stumbled across it. So I decided that “Foodie = Lazy English” would be the title of a future post, not having the faintest idea what the post would be about.

I’m not superstitious, and I don’t believe in signs. I do, however, pay attention to things around me, and, in the absence of a more rational alternative, use the things around me to justify decisions.

I don’t know what to call this kind of behavior. It’s not random or amoral like “Luke Rhinehart’s Dice Man”, and it’s not like Steve Jobs’ “connecting the dots looking backwards”. In fact, it’s more of a “connecting the dots because they’re there”. A lot of my life’s decisions have been supported by dots. Sometimes the strings of dots are short, and sometimes they’re long.

I once drove to Parma because I woke up with “We Open in Venice” running through my head. 2 dots.

I named a dog Ascanius because I was reading the Aeneid when I found him. And when I couldn’t keep him anymore, I gave him to a woman who loved Greek and Roman literature. 3 dots.

I stayed in a friend’s house in Sydney, and didn’t think she had enough on her walls. On my way to meet her for dinner I stopped in a frame shop going out of business. I bought her an imitation Rothko. She didn’t know who Rothko was, which isn’t surprising because there wasn’t a single one of his paintings on public display in Sydney. That weekend we drove to Canberra, because the National Gallery had two. Because one of them was a sunrise, I insisted we get up to see the real thing the next morning. We went to bed late. Sunrise was early. We got up anyway, and watched it, exhausted. 4 dots.

At that point I thought: “I’d like spend more time with someone willing to follow me following my dots.” A few years, and many dots later, we married.

We were going to be married by a celebrant, but we decided to get married by a priest. We change our minds because the night before we had to pick a celebrant from three different web sites, we watched a Star Trek movie. The movie included a scene with a celebrant. I don’t remember which life occasion she was ministering, but her New Age palaver made me realize that I had no interest in being connected to that line of dots. I wanted to be connected to all of my ancestors who believed in the God of the Old Testament. It was exactly the right thing to do.

That was a very big dot.

The inexplicable graffito led to this post. I wanted to decode it, or at least come up with a couple of theories. I couldn’t. But I’m happy it led me to this dot. And maybe some day, someone will stumble across this, and add a third.