Graffiti and Zombies Part II

They're up to something in that church... I know it.

Must be a seance or something. 

I thought I had dealt with all the issues involving graffiti and zombies in the first post, but clearly I was wrong. We still have things that go bump in the night, and I keep on stumbling across works of art splayed out across segments of t-wall. 

Imagine walking home late at night in the dark and suddenly this pops into view from around a corner:

He's a mean one.

It's very startling. Not sure of the history of this seven-foot-high mural of the grinch, but I often see people playing cards around that table he's looking at - so he's not so off-putting that people don't want to hang around him.

Every once in a while I'll come across an odd bit of activist-graffiti:

In 2007 a crack logistics unit was sent to Kandahar Airfield to serve as suppliers for 904 EAW. These soldiers promptly formed as a team and served the detachment to their highest abilities, today still required by the government, survive solely on subways and burger kings. If you have a problem, if no one else can supply it, and you can find them, Maybe you can hire:-

Veterans needing jobs is a very serious issue...

Sometimes it's good to see some old school slapstick to break the tension:

The flag says (phonetically)  "tok" - I assume this is an onomatopoeia like "bang".

Driving by the Army Corps of Engineers' compound one day, I catch a glimpse of the mother-load out of the corner of my eye. It seems in their courtyard they commissioned the Michelangelo of Afghanistan to paint their murals.

The mother-load.

Who is spending their time making these under-appreciated works of art? It's not like the nature of Kandahar Airfield is very conducive to artists for hire. I'm surprised that the odd soldier out there with artistic ability is willing to spend their time working on things like these when they're not busy with their military occupation or disparately clinging to every moment of free time that they get. If you're out there, artists, I appreciate you.

Night-time Dancers

At various times, while walking to my room from work, I pass these groups of people.They don't notice me, because I'm not one of them. It's like something out of The Sixth Sense. They're like the dead in the sixth sense. I speak of course, of the salsa dancers.

In their own little world.

I must've made it clear by now that there is very little to do here outside of work, play video games, exercise, eat, sleep, watch movies, read, and write a blog that people claim to enjoy. I'd probably turn to things like salsa nights and karaoke as well, if I weren't working 12 hours shifts every day of the week...

It does look fun...

I work right below an office of lawyers, and when I asked them what they typically deal with they said there's the usual stuff... and salsa night. Apparently if you get 18-20ish-year-olds together and organize a night of a very physical-contact-centric dance some people are going to claim sexual harassment.

We unknowing can only look on in envy.

A crowd always forms around the salsa dancers. Dancing is a spectacle around here. Not many people have a reason to dance, which is why, I suspect, that they organize salsa night to begin with. People need to unwind and why not salsa dancing to help them do it?  ... Maybe because of the lawsuits is why not? But I'll leave that to the powers that be.

Dancing being a spectacle, you can imagine my surprise when I saw this:

Hundreds of dancers!

There was a breast cancer fundraising dance-a-thon a couple of weeks ago. It definitely side-tracked me from my route to my room because just look!

Hope they raised a lot of money.

Graffiti and Zombies

I see enough interesting graffiti art all around KAF to make it blog worthy.

Some unit's decal.

Stop signs are a popular place for graffiti -many of them make reference to something called hammertime - what time is that? Just kidding.

Can't tell if the plane is coming or going.

The place is pretty graffiti conducive with all of the concrete barriers around...

Thundercats! Ho!

I like the cultural references.

This one is both a reference to The Shining and Johnny Carson... get it?

One of my favorites, Ron Burgundy shows up all over KAF.

Most of the graffiti consists of stencils and decals like above, but there are a few that are a bit more impressive like these:

Very impressive.

Wow.

Outside the french PX/cafe.

If this were 40 plus years ago these graffiti pieces would make cartoon wolves go like this.

I pass this collection every day on my way to work.

That last one has a good point. Not because there are hordes of walking dead attempting to eat all of our brains of which we should be wary, but because those hordes wouldn't feel out of place here. Bleak landscape, lots of concrete, place is divided into sectors, large speakers giving us announcements with creepy echo effects, no entrance or exit... I'm told it bears a resemblance to the resident evil series, but I've never seen or played those.

Couple all of this with an active imagination and you get all sorts of fun scenarios running in my head of what would make a good setting or more dramatic post-apocalyptic imagery. Look at this church:

Not scary.

Ok, it's not very scary. You can't really tell that it's the creepiest church I've ever encountered. It's within the perimeter of some eastern European forces' compound and therefore surrounded by fence and barbed wire where clearly there was some bizarre experiment gone awry in which a disease was created that causes the brain to shut down almost entirely except for the motor skills required to seek out brains to eat. Also, you're not looking at it while it's at night:

click the picture to enlarge - it's hard to see.

That picture was taken from about the same angle, and as you can see it's very eerie.
One more, but this time with all the barbed wire.

In the zombie movie that takes place on KAF, there would be a climactic scene involving the church in some way.

Graffiti like this doesn't really help the situation:

Demon trying to escape from the concrete barrier

Or this one:

Clearly sector 3 is where you have to wear your gas mask.

I've grown used to it, and pictures don't really do it justice but here's some more samples of KAF at night, when the things that go bump in the night crawl out of the woodwork.

Creepy - picture taken from the roof of the Education Center.

Creepier.

There you have it. The art scene of KAF condensed into a blog post.