shoefiti

I work at an op-shop, as I keep mentioning, and the menial task they've set me for the moment is to sort, assess, price and stock the secondhand shoes that are donated. Mostly they're really old, shitty, smelly useless junk and the work, of course, sux.
Anyway, I stumbled across a pair of tidy Nike basketball sneakers that had barely been worn. My flatmate Aamer collects sneakers so I decided to price them cheaply and buy them as a gift; the 50% discount for employees made it a very cheap purchase, too. Just as well...
For, when I got them home at the end of my shift, my boyfriend told me that they were fakes! I was disappointed and demanded to know how he knew they were fakes and he said that they didn't say 'Nike' on them, which, apparently, is a dead giveaway. I wasn't satisfied, so I decided to wait until the sneaker aficionado came home before I'd start thinking murderous thoughts of revenge on the shoes.
But lo, Aamer took one look at the shoes and confirmed Leigh's assessment, 'You can tell because of the cheap material.'
Yes, well, it seems I was duped by a pair of shoes. A pair of shoes!
So I decided to shoefiti them. That is, later that night I tied their laces together and threw them over the powerlines outside my flat.
Maybe you've seen this before, walking around some suburb in your locale, a lone pair of sneakers slung over a street's powerline, swaying lonely in the breeze.
'What's it for?' you may have asked yourself.
Well, there are theories from those who don't know shit that shoes hanging from powerlines could possibly mean:
that this is an unsafe neighbourhood; or
that there's a 'pot party' going on in the house the shoes are hanging outside of; or
that there is a drug dealer in this street; or
that a gang is operative in this area; or
that a gang member has been killed in this street; or
that a drug dealing local gang member has been killed somewhere in this vicinity, sometime, maybe... during a 'pot party'...
I like to think that it means somebody was bored and had a brainwave for brightening up the suburban landscape and getting rid of those pesky shoes without contributing to landfill or tormenting some poor, over qualified shoe pricer at the local op-shop.
Wishful thinking maybe, but shoefiti is no middling matter.
Oh no. Apparently shoefiti is on the rise.
Hell, it has a name now so it must be some kind of a phenomenon.
If you want more info, you can check out a blog called shoefiti.com
I took photos of my shoefiti, so once I get the film developed I'll post it up here.
I'm quite proud of leaving my little mark on my suburb. My only regret is that, given the above ridiculous explanations for shoefiti looming large in the paranoid public's imagination, I didn't hang the shoes outside the primary school that's just down the road...