Observations of an Unemployed Designer

I ran into the wall. Check that, the wall ran into me. This was something like running down the streetcar tracks, perhaps Queen Street. It's doable because the cars run all night - they weren't sliced up too badly in the city budget cutbacks. They've been calling it the recession, something like the receding hairline on men. One day there is no hair, just a shining globe. The head becomes glossed over and barren. If you run down the Queen St. streetcar tracks, you're likely to hit a streetcar and become like the head - barren.

It has just come to light, excusing the pun, the red light district has moved down to Queen Street. The hookers pose on the north side across from the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, a name which replaced the ominously used idiom, 9-99 Queen Street - it was the local language meaning the nut house. The loony bin tag was dropped when the politically correct took over. They corrected the local folk. The balding became the phallically challenged, the nuts became mentally challenged, perhaps the establishment feared what they would be called by the nuts if it turned out that the establishment were really the nuts.

The hookers strut their stuff on the street corners, in the shadows of the dank construction hoarding's covered with torn posters. They leer out from the glow of the street lamps which also avoided the cutbacks. Their legs are huge, their faces lonely like the balding man's head.

Their handbags hang in their curled-up fingers, pulling at their skirts; and brush gently from side to side against their legs. Some of them are menacing, huge frames towering above the sidewalk. Perhaps they are evolving naturally, adjusting to the dangers of nature. Men now drive by in their cars and yell out the obscenities. The hookers step out into the light and the cars speed up.

Down the street there is an all night bike shop with parts strewn all across the sidewalk. Inside there are parts heaped on the floor. The walls look like an installation piece, perhaps the whole shop is an installation piece. The media has not written about the shop. The public is relieved; the government is relieved.

Unemployed Designer - go to page 2

© 2005 Observations of an Unemployed Designer is copyrighted and cannot be copied in whole or in part without permission from the author.