By Jan Stürmann

Exhibitionist: Legendary New York artist Ron English has more than one show in San Francisco. There's his "Son of Pop" exhibition at Varnish Fine Art, 77 Natoma St., S.F., through July 2. Then there's this "liberated" billboard at 14th Street and Mission, one of six around town.
Guardian photo by Lori Spears

Then you look up and see a large man with unruly hair and dark glasses running across a pedestrian overpass. He fights the wind for possession of a 6-by-10-foot cardboard sign. You try to read the letters but can't. As he stops above you and fastens the sign to the fence, the big black letters pop into focus: "Halliburton: Thanks for All the Money! Sorry About Your Kids."

For each minute this sign remains up, a hundred commuters like you will be exposed to the viral message of a man who calls himself Freeway Blogger.

  

Today I'm tagging along with Freeway Blogger, who also writes under the pseudonym Patrick Randall, on a recent foray to plant messages in the minds of area drivers.

"The good thing about being anonymous is that I can kill Freeway Blogger at any time," he tells me as we drive over the Bay Bridge toward Oakland. He has just posted San Francisco's overpasses with signs that read, "Osama Bin Forgotten," "The War Is A Lie," and "Nobody Died When Clinton Lied."

In the past four years, he says, he's planted more than 2,500 of these brain-mines along California's freeways. He estimates that today's propaganda campaign could reach up to a quarter of a million people. Not bad for a few dollars in supplies and a couple hours of work.

It all started with a soggy mattress dumped on the side of a highway in Orange County. The Supreme Court had just selected George W. Bush as president after the contested 2000 election. Incensed, Freeway Blogger pushed the mattress up against a tree and spray-painted "1776-2000: RIP" across the yellow stains.

"What shocked me is that even as thousands of cars drove past it each day, the sign stayed up for a week," he says. "Suddenly I found my voice."

Since the 2000 election, 9/11, and the U.S. military's invasion of two countries, Freeway Blogger has refined the crude mattress approach to a choreographed dance of message transmission using recycled cardboard, paint, and reconnaissance.

"Freeway blogging requires a sense of rhetoric, art, science, demographics, and sneakiness," he tells me. "And it's so much fun! One person can have a hell of an influence if they are willing to break the rules a little."

His approach is Thoreauvian simple. From dumpsters behind appliance stores he scavenges cardboard. He then paints his black-lettered barbs in a rented basement studio. Where his slogans emerge from, who knows – maybe that sordid steam room of the brain where propaganda, poetry, and bumper stickers go to hook up?

When he has enough signs for another run, he loads them in his truck, along with essential tools like duct tape, bungee cords, coffee, Camels, and a stack of bluegrass CDs.

Initially, he'd post signs between the witching hour and the stirring of the first commuters. But emboldened by success – and maybe the need to raise the thrill factor – he now goes out at high noon. That's when he picks me up to tag along. He sweeps junk from the passenger seat so I can sit, then guns onto Highway 13, slips into the fast lane, and drives with the casual ease of one trained on Los Angeles freeways.

At the first overpass, he pulls off, parks illegally, checks out which way the wind blows, and makes sure no cops or nosy neighbors are watching. Then, with large sunglasses obscuring his face, he grabs "Osama Who?" and a few bungee cords, runs up the overpass ramp, unfolds the sign, clips bungees to keep it in place, and bolts back to the truck.

As sweat sparkles on his nose, he grins like a kid who just pulled one on the teacher. "This still has just enough of an adrenaline rush to keep it exciting," he says, and drives back onto the freeway to check out his handiwork. "Isn't she a beauty?" he says with admiration, and cranes his neck for a better look.

  

Until his late 30s, Freeway Blogger lived for fun and off his inheritance. "Then one day I asked myself: How have I contributed to society?" he says. He came up with nothing.

So he started a small nonprofit that collects warm clothes and distributes them directly to poor people in the Sierra Madre. After making more than 30 trips in four years, Freeway Blogger says, "I could point to a whole swath on a map of Mexico and know the people living there are a little better off because of one person."

But then Bush got into office, the mattress incident happened, Freeway Blogger was born, and his home life fell apart. His wife left him with their daughter and moved from San Diego to San Francisco, forcing him to drive regularly between the two distant cities. Along the way he'd put up signs.

"The CHP must have thought there was a whole army of us posting the overpasses," he says with a chuckle. Instead it was just one heartbroken man on a mission. "The irony is I would not have done freeway blogging so hard if my wife had not left me."

In tears one day while driving back from visiting his daughter, he decided to kill Freeway Blogger and reclaim a life of vague normality. But when he got home, he says, he was greeted by more than 200 e-mails from people in Europe who had just read an article about him. All expressed gratitude that at least one American was voicing his objection to the Iraq war.

"That's when I decided to go for broke," he says. "You see, the reason our founding fathers insisted on free speech is that when the country is threatened from within, citizens can sound the alarm. Now we have a big fucking problem: thanks to one man, the whole world hates us. What better job for an American than to try to salvage just a little bit of his country's reputation?"

And in a country where control of the billboards and airwaves has been consolidated into fewer and fewer hands, Freeway Blogger feels like he's breaking through the relentless propaganda aimed at commuters.

"I want more people to realize that this form of free speech is a vulnerable chink in the armor of the corporate-controlled mass media. For the cost of paint and a little gas, I can transmit a message to a million people," he says as we drive to the next target.

I ask him, "Isn't what you do illegal?"

"Technically, yes," he says. "And eventually they will catch me and charge me for creating a visual distraction. Which is ludicrous when huge billboards like this one" – he points to a naked Abercrombie and Fitch hunk draped across the highway – "distract drivers far more than my modest signs ever will."

For more information, see www.freewayblogger.com.