Welcome to Fingers, a newsletter by me, Dave Infante, about drinking culture, being online, and beyond. If you haven’t already, please sign up for future dispatches, OK?

Follow @dinfontay on Twitter & @its.fingers on Instagram. Send tips, praise, and pictures of barroom graffiti to [email protected], thank you very much.

I am building a visual index of barroom graffiti because god only knows how much longer neighborhood dive bars are going to be able to hang on before they are all turned into a Chipotle and I figured it’d be nice to have something to remember them by when that happens.

I need your help on this important mission, which is called #TheBarfitiProject and can be found on Fingers’ Instagram. It may seem daunting to be called upon to help preserve the living tapestry of American drinking class self-expression but actually it’s very easy. All you have to do is submit photos of your favorite dive bar graffiti and I’ll post it, OK?

Here’s a submission near and dear to my heart from Alex, Friend of Fingers:

Here’s another slapper from Geoff, Friend of Fingers:

At this point some lesser newsletter editor might lurch off on a big, profound, performatively egalitarian jag about “what dive bar graffiti means to me” but I won’t do that because what it means to me is just that it’s something interesting to look at while getting drunk in crummy bars for cheap. That’s it, that’s the tweet, moving on.

How to submit: If you have barroom graffiti to contribute to this vital historical and cultural endeavor, please DM me on Instagram, email me [email protected], or just post it on Instagram with the hashtag #TheBarfitiProject. Include the following details, if you can:

• Location: the name of the bar, what neighborhood/city/country it’s in, yadda yadda

• Date: approximately when the photo was taken

• Other: whatever you think we should know about it beyond that

You get the idea. One more note: when I say “vital” I am of course joking because #TheBarfitiProject is just a little Instagram project and in no way a corrective for the fact that dive bars are in dire straits right now on account of being dark, cramped, generally unsantizable places where people swap all manner of bodily fluids and scream stupid things into each other’s faces over the static roar of poorly wired sound systems. Nor will it fix the reality that in many American cities (including Charleston), selling cheap drinks at volume to crust punks, alcoholics, and run-of-the-mill shitbirds at all hours was already a pretty tenuous business model pre-pandemic thanks to rising real estate costs and a bunch of other depressing reasons too, I’m sure. No delusions of grandeur here.

I just thought it would be cathartic and interesting and maybe even a little bit fun to compile amateur scenes snapped in the bowels of America’s dives. Getting drunk in my apartment is fine I guess but I sometimes find myself longing for the Sharpie wall scrawl and carved-up tables and peeling stickers of a seedy bar, and I thought a little show-and-tell with the 952 (!!!) of you would be a nice way to make do for the time being. Of course if you have friends who would like to help me with #TheBarfitiProject by all means tell them about it:

Maybe it’ll make us all feel better, briefly? And now, for a spooky and semi-related story that’ll make us all feel worse!

SHUCK NAP BUILD *destroy* REPEAT

This will make (slightly) more sense soon, I promise. Source

Last month, my fiancée and I went to Savannah, Georgia, to celebrate her birthday. Savannah is a wonderful city for a whole bunch of reasons, but particularly because in certain areas, you are allowed to walk around drinking alcohol from open containers. It is one of only a dozen-ish U.S. cities (plus the entire state of Indiana, maybe?) where you can do this.

Even as the coronavirus pandemic raged on, we reasoned, maybe we could still enjoy strolling around outside with drinks in hand. Mostly, we did just that.

And then, on Sunday morning, we walked into a mundane-looking #brunch restaurant for carry-out drinks and saw this:

I stood at the bar waiting to order two plastic cups of Savannah’s traditional Chatham Artillery Punch, the words tumbling around my skull.

SHUCK NAP BUILD destroy REPEAT

It was a Sunday mid-morning rush in the pre-pandemic mode, with nary a mask in sight. The print hung at the far end of a long bar, and as soon as I got to it I realized it was a mistake to have come this deep into the restaurant. We had tried to order at the front, near the open door, but the harried host had waved us off, directing us back, back, back there, and forgetting ourselves and the 200,000 dead for a few critical moments, we shuffled off into the abyss, filing past a sea of Falcons and Panthers jerseys packed shoulder-to-shoulder at the bar, fixated on an NFL pregame show playing on mute.

Now we were here and I felt hot and vulnerable and stuck and all I wanted to do was order, pay, and leave but the bartender was shoving longnecks into a bucket full of ice and looking in the other direction.

SHUCK NAP BUILD destroy REPEAT

The poured concrete underfoot was sticky and slippery at the same time. Dirty mop water, probably. Tourists packed the booths of the dining room, seated back-to-back, uncaring. A hundred hungry trundlers tucking into tater-tots, spraying spittle and small talk in the stupefying din. The air was stale, but the opposite of suffocating in that I wanted less of it into my lungs, not more.

SHUCK NAP BUILD destroy REPEAT

SHUCK NAP BUILD destroy REPEAT

SHUCK NAP BUILD destroy REPEAT

The print leered as I paid for two watered-down drinks, scribbling a tip and signature as liquid pooled on the bar—was it water?—soaked through the receipt. Then we were gone, head down weaving through the hordes, aiming for the door, the street, fresh air.

Mocking ~*~Live, Laugh, Love~*~ as trite claptrap is a fairly well-worn internet gag these days (see above), but for literal weeks since this harrowing experience I’ve been fixated on that particular bit of bourgeoisie flotsam.

Where did it come from? Why does it exist? It might have made slightly more sense in an oyster bar I guess, but on the other hand those words don’t really track together in any context, right? It’s like someone fed all of Pinterest into a machine-learning algorithm but then also casually mentioned “I love shellfish” and the poor computer, unprepared to field that input because who could have seen this coming, cried out

SHUCK NAP BUILD destroy REPEAT

before presumably wiping its own hard drives and destroying itself in horror of what it had wrought.

Naturally I went looking for this print online. Etsy has tons of twee millennial baby schlock emblazoned with “NAP BUILD destroy REPEAT,” including a few prints that are rendered in the same disjointed combination of fonts. (Why destroy is rendered in swoopy #BrideTribe cursive, we may never know.) But nothing quite lined up. For example, this is almost it:

But the text is left-aligned, not right-aligned, and besides, SHUCK is missing. This one is almost a dead ringer for the one I spotted in Savannah, but it’s still SHUCK-less…

…and the frame is square, not rectangular. And on, and on.

Stymied, I left Etsy and plugged the phrase directly into Google. Lo and behold:

It’s the print, right down to the faux distressed wood frame. No doubt about it. But if this is the original artifact—and I’m virtually certain it is—then where is the SHUCK?

Here is what I think happened. In an effort to give this bland #brunch place in Savannah more of an Instagram-friendly aesthetic, someone bought this print from Hobby Lobby.

(If that name sounds familiar, it might be because this stupid chain of craft stores successfully sued the government to prohibit its employees from using company healthcare to pay for birth control, and also smuggled a bunch of Iraqi artifacts once. But I digress!)

Perhaps after buying this print they realized it was really designed for the playrooms of children with names like Kaiden and Dakota, and might appear odd hung in the dining area of a “new American gastropub” where hogs and humps like yours truly go to guzzle pre-mixed mimosas and watch Terry Bradshaw’s mouth move without making noise in a desperate effort to stave off the looming dread of another Monday coming. Toddler inspo? Not the right vibe. So what to do?

Look back at the photo I took. Notice how SHUCK is written in a slightly different style than BUILD and REPEAT. It’s subtle, and hard to be sure, because none of the letters in the first word appear in the other two in block caps. But if you look close, particularly at the H and the K, SHUCK appears to be… well, handwritten.

I think that someone from this restaurant took up a Sharpie and scribbled SHUCK at the top of this insipid, commodity wall art meant for “Momma to Kaiden+Dakota,” then hung it on the wall for pre-mixed mimosa wanters to post on their Instagram Stories with a #SundayFunday for good measure.

If this is true—and it seems plausible!—I don’t know what it means. It probably means nothing at all, like the phrase itself. And yet, there’s something deeply alienating about the idea of this modified knick-knack, something uncanny in its near-miss performance of warm, winking, curated relatability. Right?

SHUCK NAP BUILD destroy REPEAT

That’s simply not a thing people say, or have ever said, or will ever say. But for weeks, I’ve been turning the phrase over and over in my brain, and from its unusual cadence has emerged a haunting question. When they whitewash the graffiti from the walls of all your favorite bars, what dreck will take its place?

SHUCK NAP BUILD destroy REPEAT

The bottom shelf

• Added a couple new titles to The Fingers Reading Room on Bookshop, including Jason Diamond’s The Sprawl, an examination of the creative potential of America’s oft-maligned suburbs.

• Still got a few anti-racist beer stickers left, so if you want me to mail you one of these beauties, get yours today, here’s how.

Big thanks to Friend of Fingers, the very-talented Daniel Fishel, for this newsletter’s logo and banner art. Commission him to draw things for you at o-fishel.com.

If you have a friend you think would enjoy this piece, please forward it to them and encourage them to sign up for future editions:

All comments, questions, lavish praise, and vicious criticism on Fingers can be sent to [email protected].