Most Tuesdays I meet my friend, Austin, at Crow Bar around 7pm. Sometimes 7:30 if one (or both) of us loses track of time.¹ We drink a few Rainiers, catch up on each other’s weeks and devote at least an hour to scheming.

Our schemes are objectively half-baked. For example, there was a time we were focused on purchasing and refurbishing old claw machines. We’d fill them with oddities as prizes in the same vein as popular local mystery vending machines, with the meaningfully distinct twist of a game of skill. This, like most schemes, did not work out. The joy, however, is not in success but the act of creative and collaborative scheming.

About a year back our scheme became hyper local bumper stickers. We’d do one off “drops” that’d be sold like loosies behind the counter at our favorite dive bars. They’d be ridiculous and crude and something that’d catch the eye of the kinds of weirdos we knew. We spent weeks workshopping ideas for stickers and stashing the best of them in an Apple Note. (We still use the same one.)

We never got anyone to actually carry the stickers for us but that didn’t stop me from printing out several runs of designs we’d come up with. In the end, we mostly gave them away to friends and put a few up in bar bathrooms.

My sticker stock had grown pretty large over time and I felt the mounting pressure to make space in my hobby graveyard. I worked on convincing a friend to carrying them at his vintage shop (“you take them, and just sell them for whatever, it’s easy for us both!") I just wanted to see them on people’s cars. ² He wasn’t convinced but that didn’t stop me from sending him home with all the stickers to my name and a plastic shelf I repurposed into a display. Then I promptly forgot about them.

About a month back his shop situation changed and he packed up all the stickers and returned them. Finding myself with a dearth of flat surfaces for storing remnants of my failed schemes I hoped I could dump some of them on Facebook Marketplace. It turns out, though, people in Portland quite liked my (very dumb) stickers and (quickly) I had to order more prints, setup a real shop and figure out how to mail out a surprising number of stickers quickly.

I’ve joked with my friends that bad bumper stickers are my true art. I like making people laugh and it continues to be a lot of fun to come up with new ideas that resonate with people. So now I make bumper stickers. I’ll keep it up until it’s not fun anymore.

You buy bumper stickers here.