I must be losing my mind

One of my latest “projects” is recording the best of the graffiti on the men's bathroom walls. I know it sounds strange, but I wondered what you could tell about a place and it's people by reading what folks write while they sit on the toilet. Maybe if I record enough of it there will be some pattern that will rise out of the chaos? That's anthropology right?

I guess this all started when I first got here. One of the resident Sergeant Majors decided that there was too much graffiti on the bathroom walls so he had all the bathroom stall doors removed. On the surface, the rationale was that people won't write graffiti if they are sitting on a toilet exposed to the world. But I'm sure he just did it to screw with everybody (he has a private bathroom in his quarters). The Army often seems to solve specific problems by making global changes.

Some of the removed doors with the worst of the graffiti were painted over with black spray paint and reinstalled a month or two later. One of my favorite "writings" is on one door where someone scratched into the black paint, exposing the white paint below. The message says: "How will we write on the walls now?"

Another good one is something I had never heard before but has probably been around for a long time: "I love the fucking Army and the Army loves fucking me."

I really enjoy the misspellings-- my favorite misspellings are contained in one sentence: "weman" and "soskwatches", the latter term referring to the former. They were shooting for the plural of “sasquatch”, trying to describe the women of the Army as resembling mythical ape-like creatures.

Most of the writing is on the theme of leaving Afghanistan or "Asscrackistan", opinions about the Army, or what people want to do, drink, smoke when they get back to the US. There is a minor sub theme of questioning the sexuality of the Air Force personnel, but it is half-hearted and not very creative. There is a recurrent theme of real or imagined sexual conquests, naming specific females and their anatomical characteristics, and then there is the obligatory “for a good time, come to this stall at midnight...”. Surprisingly, or not, there is a high percentage of homosexually themed graffiti-- statements about having sex with Afghans, other soldiers...

If there is a coherent pattern in all this, it hasn't fully resolved. I'll keep you posted.

Yes, it can get pretty boring here.