Tiny moments of delight

Snail Watch and The Bumper Sticker Files

It’s good to have a low-stakes, ongoing project of attention.

A few years ago I started paying attention to snails and bumper stickers. Not together, my interest in both just kind of developed around the same time, both thanks to my dog.

Despite being a basset hound — a breed we were told is so lazy they sleep 18 hours a day — Otis will never let you forget when it’s time for a walk. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays this hound from the swift completion of his rounds. It doesn’t matter if you’re not in the mood or if you’re tired or if you have a meeting to get ready for. When it’s time for a walk, it’s time for a walk.

It can get a little repetitive. I’ve written about the mundanity of our regular walks back in SLC and how I was able to find moments of surprise and delight by paying closer attention to things on our route. While that post was more about seasonality and cycles, today I’m thinking about another kind of noticing project.

One morning, early in our tenure in SLC, Otis and I were out on our morning walk and I noticed / was surprised by / almost stepped on! a snail. I ground our pace to a halt so I could crouch down and look at the little slow-moving cutie. After a minute we moved on and my mood was just a little bit brighter. From then on, I kept an eye out. They usually made an appearance when it was early and cool, after a night of rain. And that was the birth of Snail Watch.

It’s almost admirable how nothing in this photo is in focus.

For the next 3 years, I documented the snails on our walks. Whenever I saw one, I’d slow our pace and snap a pic or video (nearly indiscernible from a picture because of how slowly they move) and post it on my stories. I don’t know if anyone cared but I liked seeing them and sharing them. Actually, I do know some people cared because I get semi-regular dms of snails and just the other week a friend sent me this news story about snail racing over in the UK.

Those snails are one of the few things I miss about SLC. Bellingham is more slug territory from what I’ve seen so far, and while I can get down with a slug, they’re just not as cute. The shells and antennae are essential to making them less loogie-like. I half-heartedly tried to convert Snail Watch into Slug Watch but it doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi. And frankly there are just too many slugs for it to feel special.

This project isn’t ending, but it is on hiatus. In its honor, here’s a minute of highlights from 3 years of Snail Watch.

The other noticing project I took up, which continues to this day, is bumper stickers. One morning I was driving Otis to daycare¹ and I passed a truck on the side of the road with a decal taking up the entire back window that read: IF YOU’RE GOING TO RIDE MY ASS AT LEAST YOU COULD PULL MY HAIR.

I *gasped* and almost crashed into the car in front of me. I made a mental note to get a picture to show Ben when I passed it on my way back. But the truck was gone by then. Lost. It became my white whale and from that day forth my eyes scanned window decals and bumper stickers as I drove around the city.

Not every bumper sticker is created equal. Finding a good one is a real treat. For every 1 that’s good enough for me to take out my phone, I see 20-30 that don’t impress. But what exactly is “good”? It’s different for everyone, I suppose, given I would never dream of putting 90% of the bumper stickers I see in the wild on my car.

The bulk of bumper stickers out there fall into the mundane / utilitarian category: politics, environmental issues, those stickers you get at a race that say how far you ran, local businesses, that “coexist” one, stick figure families, memorials, Jesus stuff. I waffled on this but I’d also put fandoms and band stickers into this category: your Harry Potter, LoTR, Marvel, etc; your Grateful Dead and DMB fire dancers.²

Then you have your simple illustrations: aliens are popular everywhere, bigfoot is popular up here (I can’t tell how tongue in cheek it is), more stick figures and cartoon characters getting up to various antics, and plenty of benign, decorative things like flowers and flames.

Then — here’s where it gets interesting — you have your explicitly sexual stickers. It’s most likely the residue of my prudish Catholic upbringing, but I’m always surprised at these. There’s the “pull my hair” one that started this whole thing, but there are plenty that never make it to my ig stories (anime porn, mostly). As liberated as I like to think I am, it makes the reserved Midwesterner in me blush. Time and place, I think to myself, before calling myself a nerd. I just send those to Ben with a simple, omg.³

Like Snail Watch, I never set out to document bumper stickers with any specific criteria and I didn’t care if anyone else cared. It was just fun to notice and post. Some patterns formed over time, though, and looking back on my tiny collection now I see I’m drawn to stickers that are weirdly sexual, funny about death, and things that are just a little odd (but in the right way).

Unofficial Bumper Sticker Files criteria:

• It’s a “know it when you see it” type of thing. It can’t be too on the nose. It can’t be something that feels like a tired joke, even if it’s the first time I’ve seen it.

• Usually it’s something that provokes an involuntary noise: a laugh, a gasp. I love being lightly scandalized.

• It’s almost always text-based.

• It’s usually something I’ve only ever seen once.

• Mom jokes, apparently.

• It can’t be too mean-spirited.

Sometimes I can predict what other people will respond to, sometimes it takes me by surprise. A couple times I posted something I was on the fence about and regretted it, either because I realized within a couple of days that I’d fallen victim to a viral bumper sticker or because the thing turned out to be a crowd pleaser even if it didn’t make my heart sing — so it goes with posting on social media.

But just last month, something very special happened. I was walking to yoga and my eyes flitted over a small sticker, not registering the message. And then my brain caught up. There it was on an unassuming Kia. My white whale, at last.

This isn’t the end, though. I’ll continue gathering stickers as the “good” ones cross my path. Here are some of my other favorites from the past few years.

Do you have any noticing projects? I’d love to hear about it!

Here’s one final snail from my last 100 days of drawing challenge, as a bonus.

---

This week’s song on repeat

Find the whole playlist here.

1. Can we come up with another name for doggy daycare? It’s so embarrassing to say.

2. There’s room for crossover with band stickers, if the band has funny merch. But fandom stickers are almost never funny, even / especially when they try to be.

3. Of course there’re also the ones that make me think, something’s actually wrong with this person, or just, what a fucking loser: confederate flags, gun stuff, MAGA shit, aggressively misogynistic stuff, creepily militaristic stuff, the cybertruck in our neighborhood with a giant thumbs down sticker (just for being extra douchy, which is almost douchy enough for me to circle back around and admire it for how douchy it is), etc.