Portland, SF, Atlanta, Phoenix

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Living Free Around the Bay Area

Man I love living in a country where you can do this.










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Nightblogging Santa Rosa

Notice how the addition of cardboard and paint subtly alters the visual impact of this pedestrian overcrossing? In the first photo we see little more than the general outline of bars and fencing illuminated by streetlight, whereas in the second photo the once impartial infrastructure is transformed into a bold political statement, unmistakeable in its sentiment and intent.

The sign measures about eight by eight feet and I made it out of a car parts box I found behind an auto body shop. Because the lettering was so large and the character count so small, tracing and painting didn't take much more than ten or fifteen minutes. Posting was a snap: large enough to stand on its own it didn't require any suspension, so three bungee cords radiating from a hole in the middle to the edges was all it took to hold it securely to the fence. Took less than a minute.

When I saw it from the freeway I started laughing out loud. The size, clarity and sheer audacity of the words, hovering indisputably the way they were over the freeway seemed hilarious somehow...

God I love this job.

More on Nightblogging

Long Island

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Scenic Alaska

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News Item

2.3 BILLION DOLLAR FENCE RENDERED USELESS BY THIRTY-FIVE DOLLAR LADDER!

"Nobody could've imagined they would've used ladders..." White House Responds

San Diego - Department of Homeland Security Officials reported today that the new, 2.3 Billion Dollar Security Fence had been breached by a thirty five dollar ladder. "We never saw it coming..." one official declared. The ladder, a pair of wooden beams connected by what security officials are terming "rungs", was found this morning, left at what officials believe to be the site of the illegal crossing. During a hastily convened press conference this morning, DHS officials admitted there was no way of knowing how many people may have used the ladder to cross the border illegally. "It could've been one - it could've been a thousand," sighed one official, "It's a goddam ladder, fer chrissakes!"

White House officials responded angrily to charges that the use of ladder technology by those wishing to cross the fence should have been prepared for. "Nobody could have predicted the use of ladders in this situation." declared White House Press Secretary Tony Snow. When questioned by reporters about a Presidential Daily Briefing from July entitled "Mexicans Determined to Use Ladders to Cross Fence", Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice dismissed it as a "historical document" and refused to elaborate, while Donald Rumsfeld was quoted as saying "Did they have a ladder? Well, yes, I suppose so. Did they use it to cross the fence? Possibly. Is it possible they may have more ladders they might try and use again in the future? Goodness Gracious Me-oh-My Heavens-to-Betsy Katie-bar-the-door!"

Americans have become increasingly concerned over the issue of illegal immigration. Jim Gilchrist, one of the founders of the "Minuteman" border watchdog group put it simply: "What they do is they come over here illegally, they get jobs and then they work really hard and raise families. Many of them send money straight back to Mexico to help their parents and other family members survive. It's disgusting, that's what it is. It's disgusting and downright un-American!"

Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton which was awarded the multi-billion dollar no-bid contract to build the fence, responded to charges they knew in advance it would be worthless against ladders with a brief, terse statement: "We stand by our work one hundred percent and request that the American People simply bend over a bit further and take it."

Despite the barrage of criticism, President Bush remained committed to the fence, saying it had done "a heckuva job..."

Endless War

I made this sign out of a mattress box. It measured about seven-by fifteen feet and was visible to all lanes of traffic on the 580 by the Richmond/San Rafael bridge. The sign took less than an hour to make and cost about fifty cents in materials. Using a hammer and nails it took less than a minute to post and stayed up for two days.

Download Your Own Endless War Ribbon Here

(This image should be considered as part of the public domain. Feel free to use it on T-Shirts, bumperstickers, or any other commercial or private endeavour. Go Wild. )

Around the Bay...

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The Battle For Los Angeles

On one side you have the entire corporate media machine: Every Billboard, print ad, TV and Radio Spot. On the other you have Our Man in LA, armed with cardboard, paint and the ability to use them. It's become obvious by his placement and consistancy, that this is a guy who Gets It.



Getting It means the understanding that free speech is not just something to applaud and protect, it's something you have to DO. And once you've done it a few times, familiarized yourself with the rules of the game, you realize three things: 1.) It's Fun. 2.) It's Easy. and 3.) If you're reasonably smart about it, you could do it forever and never get caught.


"If I had ten divisions of such men, our troubles here would be over very quickly."
-Kurtz



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TN, NY, CA, MD

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Live Free or Die

I've started hanging these around the Bay Area as a challenge to the people who've been ripping up my signs: let's see them do the same to a piece of their own country's history.




For those of you who've been wanting to do this yourselves but were nervous about the legality, consider "Live Free or Die." Let's face it, the day that hanging up signs that say "Live Free or Die." becomes illegal in this country, that's the day that America dies.
For me it's a protest against everything we've just given away: the right to a trial, to be able to face your accuser... the right to say that you come from a country that doesn't commit torture. Although I doubt much of my audience will read any of that into it, I think the freeways look a hell of a lot better with them than without.



If nothing else, people will see that somebody felt they had the right to do this. I figure if I keep hanging signs and people keep seeing them, eventually some of them will start doing it too.

I had a brief appearance on Hannity and Colmes last week. They showed some of my signs, summarized the project and then Hannity said what I'm doing is illegal, costing the taxpayers money and that I was (get this) "trespassing on public property." I said it might be illegal in North Korea or someplace like that but that in America when it comes to political speech, public property means my property and I'm free to do as I please. Then he said I was wrong, I said I was right, Colmes tried to say something but failed and then Hannity finished off by saying I was "too cheap to buy a billboard." Not really what you'd call a stirring debate, but it did result in an inbox full of hate mail from Fox viewers.

One of the letters was so succinct and, in its way, beautiful, it could've passed for poetry:



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Sonoma County

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They Call Me "Mungen Cakes"

Dear Freewayblogger,
I blog around the outskirts of Portland Oregon. I was inspired to start up by seeing your work, that and the fact that I'm so pissed at what's happening to my country I can hardly see straight.

I pretty much use the technique described in your how-to video except I use a digital projector instead of an overhead, which makes it easy to resize and transfer graphics. Whatever's on my laptop I can trace onto cardboard... and I can make it HUGE. I do a lot of small signs too:(see attached) and while they're not as impressive visually, they do stay up a lot longer. Whatever gets the message out...

Whenever I head out to blog I think about that little girl covered in her family's blood, crying by flashlight, her parents murdered by mistake at a US checkpoint in Iraq. I think about Abu-Ghraib and all the others who've been tortured. All the others who will be tortured. I think about my nephew in Baghdad.

I was a little nervous about this at first, but when I think about what's at stake, having to face the cops or the wingnuts over my blogging doesn't seem like such a big deal. (As if they could ever catch me...) Thanks again for the inspiration man... if nothing else at least I don't feel so damn helpless in all of this. Even so, I still feel like I'm not doing enough, that I can do more.
We all can.

They call me Mungen_Cakes

Letter From Kevin Tillman

"Somehow America has become a country

that projects everything that it is not

and condemns everything that it is."

Our Man in Atlanta

Hey Freewayblogger, Here's some pix of signs I put up last night in Atlanta. You're right: it's a blast. Any good ideas on how to stick signs up to concrete walls? special tape? Liquid nails maybe? I've got a 6' x 9' image of the Abu-Ghraib figure I want to put up and have just the right place for it...

Thanks for turning me on to this. It feels damn good to be able to reach so many people, and it is a hell of a rush, but at the same time I can't help feeling like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon: "Man, I'm getting too old for this s__t."
- Atlanta


Dear Atlanta, Great Work, and thanks for having the guts to do it. Here are my thoughts on walls: if it's a retaining wall set way back from traffic, just keep the top flaps on the cardboard and hold it down with bricks/rocks etc. Forget glue, Liquid Nails, etc.: it's not worth the effort and could be considered vandalism. Blogs should be able to be removed without a trace or damage to property.

Remember that anything you can see while driving is a place you can put a sign and people are going to read it. You have hundreds of miles of trees, fencing and infrastructure to work with, so attempting tricky stuff like concrete walls is unnecessary. Your greatest strength is being able to strike anywhere, quickly, and at anytime. Any postings that make you feel like Danny Glover should be avoided.

Once you've posted a few more times and found a couple of good spots, you'll find it's pretty easy to cover a couple major freeways in just a few minutes time. The key to successful freewayblogging is economy of effort: striving to reach the very highest number of people with the least amount of effort on your part. Like Zen: Conserve your strength.

Whatever you do, Don't Burn Out: You're now the most widely-read political commentator in Atlanta that hasn't been bought-and-paid-for... so until others start doing it, that makes you the Voice of the People. So be proud, conserve your energy and above all, have fun. That might seem a bit superficial, but trust me, it's important. I've hung over three thousand of these things now, and there's no way I could've kept doing it if it wasn't a fuck of a lot of fun.

Skip the wall, use a fence, and if you want Sparky (my name for the Abu-Ghraib figure) to stay up, place him somewhere off to the side of the freeway, not directly on an overpass.

Don't stop.

-Scarlet P.



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Silence is Complicity

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Leaving Notes

Although they don't care much for me, I really don't mind the people who take down my signs. In fact, I think I have more in common with them than the people on my side of the aisle who do nothing. At least they're taking part in the dialogue... sort of. At the very least they care enough to get out of their cars.


Sometimes I like to leave them notes.

Torture State

Some time after midnight we welcomed our 300,000,000th visitor to the Land of the Free.
A few hours later, George Bush signed legislation putting us all in a torture state.

Welcome to America: Have a Nice Uday.

Around the San Francisco Bay

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San Diego

Slideshow Here






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Santa Cruz/San Jose

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Back in the Saddle

Those of you who've been following this blog may have noticed that my sign count's been stuck at 609 for awhile, giving the rest of you time to sweep a whopping 200 signs ahead of me. Good: This is one contest I'd really like to lose.

After a couple of years now living pretty much on the road, I've finally moved into a new place, close to my daughter, with a yard for my bunnies and a small garage for painting. I won't say where exactly, but suffice it to say that commuters in Marin and Sonoma counties will know there's a war going on and that at least one person is decidedly against it.

(Update: Over half these signs are still up after three days.)

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Burma Shave

All four panels up for over 48 hours south of Portland, OR









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For the price of a gumball...

Some signs you just know are going to last. This one, placed on a tree above a retaining wall in Hollywood, was seen by over a hundred thousand people per day for eight days before it was taken down. Think about that: a sign that took ten minutes to make and cost about a nickel was read over a million times.

Pretty much any one of you reading this could do the same: it'd probably take less than an hour. So could've any one of the hundreds of thousands of people who saw it. The person who took down the sign didn't replace it with one of their own, nor did anyone else. Pretty amazing when you think about it... and pretty sad too.

When I started freewayblogging in earnest, three years ago, I figured it wouldn't take more than fifty or a hundred well-placed signs for people to "get it": that once a few million people had seen that someone was putting up signs, at least a few of them would realize "Hey, I could do that too!"

Didn't happen.

Ironically, I think the mindset that keeps people from putting up signs is the same one that keeps them from taking mine down: "Not My Job." Maybe they're right.

For me though it seems obscene to remain silent in one of the few countries where you're allowed to speak out. To see the lives, treasure and reputation of my country squandered so shamelessly in an immoral war, to watch the President and Congress turn the United States of America into another stinking torture state without so much as a whimper from its citizens... to see all that and remain silent, to me is unconscionable. Especially knowing that I can reach a million and a half people for the price of a gumball.

A couple of weeks ago I was a guest on a right wing talk show in New Jersey. When the host brought up the notion that what I'm doing is illegal and amounted to nothing more than littering, I said that that would be up to the courts to decide, and that it might be difficult to argue that free speech is "litter" in a court of law, standing in front of the flag and all... too many people have given their lives for my right to "litter" for anyone to call it that.

I went on (borrowing from Edward Abbey) to say that you couldn't really litter a freeway anyway... that freeways are litter: huge, multi-ton slabs of concrete garbage, gigantic monuments to our stupidity and greed. I said as far as I was concerned, freeways were like a gun pointed to the heads of my grandchildren's grandchildren.

"So you're one of those people who thinks we shouldn't have cars at all... that we should just walk everywhere?"

"No - not quite... but lets put it this way: if we could bring back the men who founded this country... Washington, Jefferson and all them... if we could bring them back and show them a sign on a freeway... They'd say something would have to go alright, but it wouldn't be the sign."

Our Lady of Columbus, Ohio

Commuters in Columbus Ohio have been kept informed of at least one citizen's opinions on torture, the war, and the men who brought us both: our own Aunt Bea. Despite being a grandmother, as well as somewhat disabled, she has what it takes to speak out: Cardboard, paint, and guts enough to use them.

Using the special non-patented freewayblogger method pictured below (in other words, bungee cords) Aunt Bea's work on fencing and the overpasses have made her quite possibly the most widely-read political commentator in the greater Columbus Metropolitan Area... certainly the most widely read working on a budget of under five dollars.






Apprised of her uncommon courage and valor, Arianna Huffington sent her a signed copy of "Fearless", something those of you who've considered doing this might want to pick up. Like most fledgling movements, ours is a revolution with a lot more sympathizers than activists, which is a pity given that the difference between the two boils down to nothing more than cardboard, paint and a little bit of nerve.




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Some Big, Beautiful Signs

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Mark Foley Book Club

Free Bumpersticker for New Members!



(Voted Best Campaign Slogan of 2006)

Roman Holiday!

Some vacationing freewaybloggers sent these in from Rome, constituting our first documented cases of Pantheon and Coliseum-blogging.





I suggested that as a public service they post the following outside of airports and travel agencies:


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More from the Freewayblogger Nation

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Greenlight This Project

Just got a call from Christophe Joly, a French documentary maker with a piece on Freewayblogging on Current.tv, which seems to be a sort of Euro-You-Tube. Anyway, the piece has shot up on the charts to 4th place and needs just a few more greenlights to win.

If You're A Member of Current.tv Click Here and give it a Greenlight

To Become A Member Click Here (it's easy.)

If the piece wins it will be shown on european broadcast television, which would be cool for a couple of reasons, not the least of which being to show them that at least some of us are fighting back. Remember, we're probably going to need their help to rebuild this country once the Republicans are finished with it.