The Suburban Book of the Brain-Dead

I call them "suburban prayer flags". They appear on telegraph poles, at traffic lights and in shopping centres. At first they're fresh and clean and have neat frills of tear-offs bearing mystical text and numbers. Over time they lose their frills and become increasingly grimy, torn and illegible. New ones appear and are plastered over the old and a geological strata of paper and sticky tape develops.

I'm speaking, of course, of those "I need ten people to lose 30kgs" and "Are you lonely?" and "Jiu-Jitsu Training" flyers. They come in sizes from small to huge (I include the corflute "Free Beer Band, Saturday, Green Slug Inn", "Kitchen Showroom" and "Spit Roast" posters) which can be stuck, glued or nailed to just about anything that stands more or less upright.

I call them "suburban prayer flags" because they represent the unattainable aspirations of those without hope; those without riches of any sort; those with an unthinking selfishness; those without a proper job; those without a clue.

The flags never appear on Mondays. Like burglars, their creators seem to only come alive after the sun has set on the first day of the week. In furtive groups these opportunists prowl the streets - much like graffitists prowl alleys and railway viaducts - in search of an easy target. It's illegal, of course, to use public property for advertising of any sort without permission. In NSW it's covered by Section 9 of the Summary Offences Act. But just try and tell these idiots.

Imagine these losers: they're running some fly-by-night business that's got a cash-flow problem, almost certainly because they're criminally hopeless at running a business (or hopelessly criminal). So their tactic is to print up a bunch of low-quality flyers and spend hours at night pounding the streets, or hopping in and out of a kerb-crawling car, using miles of sticky tape putting the flyers up in the vain hope that some fool will take one of the "feathers in the tail of a turkey" and actually do business with them.

They're fools. Their nocturnal detritus is easily rendered futile because their posters happen to come down much more easily than they went up. I know because I remove this junk frequently whilst walking. It takes no special effort at all. It was whilst removing a poster once that I was challenged by a woman who demanded to know why I was taking down her poster. I replied that I was cleaning up litter, to which she responded "Well, I pay taxes and I'm entitled to put them up." An interesting point of view, if utterly incorrect.

"Madam, you can keep putting them up but I'll keep taking them down. I walk this way every day, so we'll see who gives up first."

It's all just "street spam". As spam is to us when we read our e-mail, so is street spam to us when we walk about. And like spammers, the perpetrators of street spam deserve to be pilloried, ideally by being handcuffed to a traffic pole with their own posters attached to them in the method they originally used to put them up. (Hand me those self-tapping three-inch screws, will you?)