He was holding up a sign that read “HUNGRY AS fuck” as he laid on a pavement covered by filth, left behind by the shoes of all the passerby that looked down their noses at him. The sign was fashioned out of a discarded piece of cardboard and the words written upon it were done so with a Sharpie.
I found his choice of fonts very peculiar as they reflected a level of premeditation and a rudimentary knowledge of design. The word “HUNGRY” was written all in caps as was the word “AS”; which was also underlined for emphasis. The icing on the cake, in terms of the punchline and font style, was the word “fuck”; which in the context of the whole statement was emphatic given the fact that it was all in lowercase and in cursive. Urgent and alarming. Rash, but polite. Similar to hearing an F-bomb being dropped by a British person, you feel insulted, but it just sounds so damn cool. He wanted to call your attention to the squalor he was living in, but he didn’t want to come off as a complete savage.
His sign was a brilliant one; probably the brightest aspect of a life that is hard to live. This sign is read every day and then brushed off by the passerby, piling on top of the filth they leave behind, on the hopes and aspirations of a desperate transient man. A man lost in LA.
Jose Oseguera 