In Lieu of "IN LIEU OF ATTENDANCE"

For those who usually get their weekly "IN LIEU OF ATTENDANCE" church photos, here's one to tide you over. Journal Space is down probably through the Christmas week so we decided to lend a hand. Here's a nice little church we found in Beaufort, South Carolina. It doesn't appear to be in full operation at least not as a church. It seems that it's currently an art studio, but once a church, always a church we feel.

Hopefully, Walk This Way will return when Journal Space recovers from a double drive failure of their system. That's about like our losing all 8 cylinders on top of 4 flat tires so are pulling for a quick recovery.

Myrtle Wilson, we presume ?

We seek and find all sorts of large outdoor murals. Some are beautiful, some are snappy, sneaky promotional art, others are just plain strange. We find them in major metro areas adorning the otherwise dead flat walls of commercial structures. We find them sharply painted upon the fading brick walls of abandoned public places. They jump out at us in the most unexpected spots in rural communities. One place we do not see them is within the confines of the Charleston peninsula where carefully managed historic facades neither need nor are allowed such aftermarket adornments.

We are on Liberty Street which runs the one block between King and St.Philip Streets. This one jumps out at you. Where all shops in the area are at ground level this images looks down upon them. It reminds us of the billboard advertising Dr. T.J. Eckelburg's Optometry Practice in F. Scott Fitzgeald's "THE GREAT GATSBY." In that book the all seeing eyes on the billboard seemed to lord over the " valley of ashes " observing all of the sordid coming and goings of the wealthy libertine summer people.

Myrtle Wilson is the attractive wife of a simple compliant garage mechanic. They live at his garage and under Eckelburg's all seeing billboard. She spits on their honest, but dreadfully boring life as she drops her dignity and lifts her skirt for a taste of the fast and glamorous life of Tom Buchanan. Buchanan later runs her over with Gatsby's automobile and leaves her behind as just so much roadkill. In his despair Mr. Wilson looks up at Eckelburg's billboard and says, " God sees all ."

We doubt that the artist (aerosolart.com) had intended the woman with her chin on our roof to be God. To our way of thinking she could well be a Myrtle Wilson looking out over the breathtaking jewelry, high fashion dresses and other keys to luxury which she craved so desperately in life. Far too dead to possess any of these things she's condemned for eternity to watch others shopping for, buying and enjoying those material objects for which she seems to have discarded her life.

Octane Booster

As we drove aimlessly around downtown Charleston in a light rain we wondered how things had gone so very wrong in every way and getting worse by the hour. It was that kind of overcast day during which the sun is not seen so time stands still. The combined effects of weather and events drew us slowly into the blue funk of despair. The real danger of such times is that you don't truly feel sorry for others, but for yourself. That's a can of Drano for the soul.

Everything runs together under these circumstances. Clearly events were controlling us rather than the other way around. The pointlessness of passing shop after shop which we were not going to enter, from which we would purchase nothing was numbing. Suddenly we came upon the two folks you see in the photo above. That put the sunshine back in our day, boosted our octane and made us again happy to be alive.