eM hsaW

I saw a car the other day with a fresh coating of snow on its back window (not a shocker in MN). What was interesting is that someone had taken time out of their day to carefully scrawl "Fuck Dave" in the pristine white powder. 

This wasn't a hasty scribble.  It was printed in all caps, thoughtful and neat and deliberate.

I was immediately intrigued by this for several reasons. First, who's Dave?  Is he the driver of the car?  If so, the epithet must be quite personal. Whoever wrote it has to either know which car Dave drives (a disgruntled neighbor or coworker perhaps) or, in an even better scenario, ride in that car with him often enough to think he's an asshole (a carpool buddy, perhaps a girlfriend).

Then again, the message wasn't "Fuck you, Dave," so maybe that car is just an unwitting bearer of a larger message, much as a graffitied bus bench can be.  *See my posting from September 2, 2008, titled "Dylan, What Did You Do?"

Next question: How long do you think Dave drove around that day before noticing that he was viewing all the vehicles behind him through a smear on his good name? If the message's author had really been thinking, and if the sentiment was indeed personal, it should have been written backward, so that it was clearly readable in the rear view. It's not like the rest of us wouldn't have figured it out. Plus, it really would have packed a wallop as soon as Dave threw that car in reverse.

My point is this: If you're going to use nature as a dry erase board of profanity, make it count. Be inventive. Have a sense of humor, like the person who wrote "SLUR" on the back of a bus seat. 

I'll give this particulr vandal props, though. Because we use snow for many things ... we make angels with it, we build men out of it, but I've never before seen the F-bomb rendered so perfectly in it.