Wonderoom

This sign graces the steps ascending one of the pyramids of Chichen Itza. It is one of the many signs I have run across that stuck with me. A found poem mesmerizing in it’s simplicity. After all, it is indeed dangerous to go up. Whether on steps, or a plane, or climbing a mountain. And what does it mean to go up? Up in power? Up in a spiritual sense? Up into the ivory tower of dry and dusty studies of irrelevant things? Up into the intellectual realms of absurd musings? Up your ass?

Here’s another. Quite the famous one, thousands (millions?) of people have been struck by it’s existential positing. It’s almost religious in it’s overtones. An agnostic acknowledgement of the possibility of natural phenomena. Storms may exist. The Jemez mountains may exist just over this hill. The rest of the world may exist. God may exist. Who created this sign? Who is responsible for peppering this lofty sentiment on the roadsides of the West? Is there some other way to say this?

OCCASIONAL WIND GUSTS HERE

CAUTION: POSSIBLE WIND GUSTS

IT GETS WINDY HERE SOMETIMES

It’s just not the same…is it? With GUSTY WINDS MAY EXIST, you get a warning and a momentary meditation wrapped up in one.

For me, there is the additional dyslexic tendency to transpose the “t” and the “s” so that the sign reads GUTSY WINDS MAY EXIST. Suddenly nature develops a sort of ballsy perkiness.

Roughly twenty years ago, while shopping, I was wandering around a mall that had the sign IT’S A MALL WORLD posted all over the place. That in itself was creepy enough, but while skirting around the construction of a new store I spotted IT’S A MALL WORLD…WATCH YOUR STEP, reminding the casual shopper that the world was gradually transforming into a meaningless landscape of mindless consumerism. Watch your step indeed.

But we don’t need such masterpieces of alternate meaning to expand the profound lack of depth in our lives, do we? Even the everyday can expand if we try. Let’s take BEWARE OF DOG, which people will slap onto fences regardless of the actual presence of a real dog. BE WARE. WARE. As in wary, or simply aware. Be aware of dog. Be sensible of the existence of dog. Maybe not even this dog, but of dogs in general. Be aware of dogness, in the Platonic sense. The idea of dog. Certainly we don’t want to be aware of dog in other than a platonic sense because that’s just nasty.

PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED. Please wait to find your place, your base of operations, your center of power in the medieval sense. Please wait to go medieval on your ass.

O.K., I get a little crazy with this. One can lose oneself in signage re assignation. I had a friend who had a problem with a particular STOP sign that he kept running across again and again as he walked a neighborhood one night. Granted, he was tripping on so many hits of acid the world probably looked like one giant Picasso, but the thing is he couldn’t seem to get away from this one STOP sign. Finally he took out his lighter and burned a small offering to the sign,  managing to get away. At least that’s what he told us afterwards. I remember thinking I was glad I didn’t run into the same sign, or I might still be sitting cross legged in front of it.

Signs have power. We are meaning making creatures, meaning manipulating creatures. Lock us in a room with something, and we will begin to assign meaning to it, like Tom Hanks and the volleyball on that desert island. Jesus Christ on a cheese sandwich. Wow, that could be my new replacement for “Christ on a stick.” “Christ on a sandwich!”

I’ve got to stop.

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