I really should have known better than to think that a sticker asking to "trust us" would actually work out for me. Part of the problem is admittedly because it is a vague enough phrase and symbol that successfully finding the people behind it would generally be a stretch any way. But the other reason I should have known better is that any time someone is asking you trust them it's always a bad sign. My friends love to play board games, so much so that we have a bi-weekly game night and a small group that has started their own podcast Men on Board. While we do tend to play anything, our go-to games are usually social deduction games. Games like Werewolf, Resistance, Two Rooms and a Boom, or even Mafia where the main goal is to figure out who the "bad" guy is. We've played these games for so long that at this point they very quickly devolve into a blur of yelled accusations, often accompanied by those ubiquitous trust mes. Now I can't say I'm innocent in any way, when I end up being the bad guy in these games my main goal is always to throw the game into as much chaos as I possibly can, but I have developed a general distrust of that phrase.
A big thing I find interesting about this sticker though is the possible symbolism throughout it. First you have the crossed fingers above the phrase. Now crossing your fingers is a fairly well known action but one that curiously has two possible meanings. Some times you cross your fingers to try and give yourself a little bit of luck, generally hoping for the best. Other times you're giving yourself a way out of a promise and lying through your teeth. According to one site I found there is some thought that the reasoning behind both meanings of this action actually comes from the same idea, that you are asking for God's help to accomplish your task. Crossing your fingers is thought to have developed from early Christianity as a way to indicate that you were a Christian and gradually turned into a method of wishing others the best of luck. The lying portion is thought to have developed since you were asking God for his help in keeping the fact that you're a Christian a secret. Either way in combination with the phrase "trust me," the people behind this sticker are looking for you to take things on faith. Along with the obvious crossed fingers, there's also the skull above crossed snakes in the middle of the phrase. The skull has quite a few possible meanings but all are generally associated with death and mortality. Whether you're looking to warn people of danger, using it to be a memento of those who have passed, or even just to prove your strength to others, the skull is a common enough sight for people to have their own personal association with it. The skull and crossbones takes on again a similar meaning of death but more commonly seen as a warning of poison or with pirates. Substituting the snake for the bones adds a bit of a different connotation. The snake is often associated with the duality of good and evil or with the ideas of fertility and rebirth depending on the culture. Another way that the snake is a bit of a contradiction is that they can be seen as representations of medicine and poison. But no matter whether you take any of these symbols in a negative or a positive light, this sticker leaves a lot up to your interpretation. While all of the possible symbolism is rather interesting, what's annoying about this sticker is that it really seemed like I would actually find something for it. If you zoom in right above the word trust, you'll find a site. Unfortunately when I tried to look snakespgh.com up on the internet, the site was no longer available. Even trying to look it up in Google didn't return any useful results. So I don't know if this was band at one point or a shop or even what's it's connection is to Pittsburgh. For some reason though it did keep bringing up the tattoo parlor 4 Horsemen Tattoo in connection to some hashtag I wasn't seeing. Who knows that Snakes was but it certainly doesn't bode well for getting you to trust them if you can't find them.
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Maggie Ondrey
An amateur photographer and writer capturing a small portion of the city. Archives
August 2017
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