Third day in San Francisco. Road through town on my touring bike - a great city to ride a bicycle in. Much faster than a car. As interesting a place as you'd think from looking at photographs.

Had three things to do: Get a new copy of my tour book at the book store (Market Street), since I just lost the one I had; go to the REI and get some underwear and misc. things and finally, go to the SFMOMA. When I travel anywhere, I have to stop at every large art museum I can find.

The bookstore on Market Street was easy enough to find as was the tour book in the bookstore.

Went to checkout and made small talk with the checkout clerk. When you buy a book about touring the Pacific West Coast while in the middle of the Pacific West Coast, you must, MUST tell everyone that sees the book that you're 870 miles from finishing.

So you do. And you catch, in the corner of the eye, the cute girl, near the door, half-listening. So you talk louder.

And you feel like a total badass. Since this girl. This girl is listening.

You finish the transaction, put on your sunglasses and walk out of the open door onto Market Street.

You neglect to realize that the door wasn't open, but closed. A huge slab of thick glass. Not a thumbprint on it. Your nose hits perfectly with good acceleration. Directly. Beautifully. Crisomsom blood comes gushing. Gushing. Gushing. Fucking polarized lenses.

You lean forward, just slightly and get out of the way of the door.

The girl that you were half-assed flirting with indirectly comes out of the door, successfully, by *pushing* the door, open. She turns her head slightly towards where you're bent down, trying to catch blood from dripping on the ground.

Without stopping her straight and beautiful and esteemed walk she takes a slight jab at you:

"That. That did not look like it felt good."

What do you say?

What do you say.

"Good thing I can... laugh at myself!?"

And you do. You laugh at yourself. Since laughter helps with the pain of almost breaking your own nose. You're wearing a red shirt anyways, so what the hell, onto REI.

REI has all I need. Especially underwear. I looked at this twenty eight dollar pair of underwear. On the package of the underwear says something like,

Three Continents, Twenty-Eight Countries, ONE PAIR OF UNDERWEAR.

God-damn it, I realized. The advertisement on the packaging got me.

I bought the twenty eight dollar underwear.

SFMOMA: I really have a love hate relationship with Modern Art. I do like Frank Stella. They had, "Zambesi" - a painting from the, Black Series. It looks like this:

I thought: OKsowhat. I like the slight Op Art of it and the use of house paint. Rules.

I went about my day. Stopped at the Mission for food. Japanese Vegetarian Restaurant: perfect.

Looked at the Soy Sauce bowl.

It's the same painting as Zambesi.

Tripped on that for a while.

(Top) - Monotype, Spray Enamel on Newsprint

I was making a stencil of the above and putting the design on a shirt. It was going to look pretty sweet:

But spraypainting something like this onto a shirt that's not, say, pure white is a really stupid thing to do - it doesn't work. So don't try it.

Well, I tried. And it failed. I did every single color. My cardboard stencil was swimming in spray paint. I used some newspaper to sop up the paint between a few of the colors, and what you see above was the result. I may play with this accident some more...

Sign found between Vancouver, BC, Canada and Seattle, Washington, USA. Caught my eye - the bold use of text.

I found the question incredibly open-ended. A choice concerning what? Was the question - CHOICE? supposed to be enough to give me context on what type of choice?

Or, was the context supposed to be created from the supplied answer: Choose Life.

Was this a choice of opposites? Was the other choice, "Death" - or, like that great Eddie Izzard sketch, could I get Cake, Death or the Vegetarian Meal? I don't know if this sign or this sign's maker ever flied Church of England Airlines.

Or, is it like Irvine Welshe's Masterpiece, Trainspotting:

Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken all the pro and cons, known ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ay sound mind etcetera, etcetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir failue. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whit they huv tae offer. Choose us. Choose Life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yer mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yerself in a home, a total fuckin embarrassement tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.

Well, ah chose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that it's thair fuckin' problem, As Harry Launer sais, ah jist intend tae keep right on to the end of the road...

Trainspotting, pg. 187-188

Maybe I was more struck at the odd placement of the sign - I was in the middle of nowhere, in Northern Washington, on a farm road, that used to be an old highway, before the interestate was put in. Who exactly is this sign posing this simple but rigidly question too?

I hate to think and I love to think that it's just an evangelical person, who decided one day, "Damnit to Hell, I'm gonna make me a big sign"

Maybe the sign was to be directed to the teenagers who created this rural graffiti:

I like how different graffiti on farm silo's in the middle of the country differ from the graffiti I see in the city on say, a smokestack at a dilapidated factory.

Later in the night, I found this storefront (somewhere near Snohomish, WA):

I had stopped at around 10:30pm to have, "dinner", which was basically junk food from a gas station:

I again like the sparsness and directness of the sign - hand painted (again), this time on Peg Board (???)

It's not always possible to sum up the entire stock of a store in one, four letter word that you can use both as a Noun and a Verb:

FEED

It's sort of strange - I took this trip and what do I take for pictures? Sunsets? Landscapes? People? Myself? No: Found typography.

Total mileage for this day was around 130 miles by bicycle.