One of my favorite activities is to ride off into the city on my bike and get a streets eye view of my surroundings.
When you're riding around in the open air you're part of the landscape. You are exposed to all the various textures of life in three dimensions.
You feel the soft brush of the wind on your face.
You can smell the perfume of the flowers or the decay of vegetation and curbside garbage, or in the worst alleys there's always the pungent odor of stale human urine.
In a car you never get to experience the tone and the aura of a place. A car closes you off from your surroundings. There's no contact with the air or the atmosphere of a place.
One of the best things about a bike trip around town is the street art.
Whenever I find interesting graffiti I stop and approach it like a naturalist approaches a rare mushroom and I capture it in a photo for safekeeping.
This one was on the side of a shopping center.
Where I live we have a lot of alligators, so you could say it's a local symbol that's found everywhere on tee shirts, street murals, local business logos and in the wild.
The way the artist does the shadow work was breathtaking. I thought of the wind up toy dreaming he was a crocodile.
Later I rode off to the other side of town where we have a public space for graffiti artists and I got so excited I decided to cross the busy street to get up closer.
Purple was a theme.
Look at the way the grime on his teeth yellows them.
Moving along the wall I see this cool looking skeletal garden pot/ planter. Look at the attention to detail.
I can't say I'm not envious at the skill that some of these street taggers have.
Sticking to the purple theme we move along and find this wild looking caterpillar.
Here's a closeup of its head.
Just when you think purple was overdone I ride out a few feet from the caterpillar and come face to face with something that looks like it escaped from a Pacman game from an 80s arcade or some shitty NFT collection on Opensea.
Green is good, or so I'm told.
This one was 🔥. A big green zombie middle finger with the anarchy symbol inside of it. If old school crypto bros could have a logo this would be it.
It was getting late and I was fiending for a quick breakfast and a coffee so I only stayed to get one more photo along this several block long wall, and it was fitting considering what day it is.
Again, the attention to detail is out of this world.
This is the sort of thing you get to admire up close and personal only when you take the time to enjoy your surroundings on foot, on a skateboard or on a bike.
If you like this sort of thing let me know. I'll make regular trips to street art spots and document it.