Up Against a Wall

We're back in Columbia, SC, and drawn close to another delightful fresco. Columbia seems to lead the state as far as we can tell in this outdoor art form, the colorful images painted on blank commercial walls. Columbia may have more blank commercial walls than the rest of the state or just more talented outdoor artists.

We are parked at a Midas franchise on Millwood Street which caught our eye while trying to track down yet another such painted wall across town. That's like having a fish jump into the boat while you're casting for different one. We can't tell what sort of luck the depicted fisherman is having, but that seems far beside the point. He's fishing while you're either on your way to work or waiting on a muffler installation so that you can eventually get there.

These frescos seem to evoke escape. They call upon you to flee from whatever unhappy, boring or unsound enterprise which is currently grinding you into the pavement. Perhaps it suggests that once ground down, you, too, will become part of the road over which other disheartened drivers must pass on their way to similar drudgery. Do you then become just another minor stratum in the seven layer cake of hell ? This one wonders whether you could give up a bit of the money to regain a bit of your sanity, we think.

Nothing so much vexes a man as knowing that some other man is out of his house, in his boat, under a clear sky and not at work. Nothing, that is, except having to see it as he does before this painted wall.

Is the man in the boat chiding you for the deadly sin of greed or is he provoking in you the deadly sin of envy ?