SUSAN CLARKE REPORTS EPIDEMIC OF SHOWER CHAIRS BEING USED AS PATIO FURNITURE

FEBRUARY 11, 2009, LOS ANGELES, Calif. A recent walk around Susan Clarke’s unnamed ghetto neighborhood has revealed an unsavoury trend in lawn décor— shower chairs designed for the elderly and handicapped being used as patio furniture. Clarke first noticed this offense on her own block, in front of a row of cottages that also included a broken baby changing table and an upside-down 5-gallon bucket of pie filling. Several weeks after spotting and therefore becoming obsessed with this anomalie, she spotted yet another sadly out-of-place shower chair several blocks away on the front porch of a falling-down but stately old bungalow. She believes that this constitutes an outright epidemic.

Clarke has spent a good deal of time analyzing why the shower chairs, which are useful bathing aids for the infirm and elderly, incite such nausea when they are out of context and located next to a pie filling bucket. The chairs have tubular aluminum frames with wide, concave, plastic seats perforated with holes. They have large rubber caps on their feet. Similarly-designed chairs are being sold at Ikea under exotic, umlaut-riddled monikers, so wherein lies the difference? “When you look at a used shower chair, consciously or subconsciously, you picture a naked, sick, old, unclean person in it. And consciously or subconsciously you know that someday you will be a naked, sick, old, unclean person. But right now it’s a sunny day and you’re just taking a walk, so you’d rather not be faced with thoughts of your humiliating spiral towards death.”

There is currently an apartment vacancy on the cottage property with the shower chair, changing table, and pie filling bucket in front. “I kind of want to move there and meet the people responsible for the display, get inside their heads, see what makes them tick,” says Clarke. “It could be some outsider artist and this is their project about the human life cycle and pie.” More likely, it is just poor people with a pile of crap.

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