The shirt reads NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH in the flat, capitalized lettering of a municipal warning sign. Above the words sits a yellow caution triangle. Inside the triangle, a hand is crossed out with a diagonal bar. The whole thing is printed on a standard t-shirt, the kind of garment that usually carries a team name or a band logo or a parish festival date. Here it carries a boundary.
I want to take the design seriously, not because it is solemn — it is not — but because it is doing something specific with the visual grammar of public safety. A caution triangle is not a decoration. It is a shape we have been trained, from driver’s ed and construction sites and hospital corridors, to read before we read the words. The triangle says pay attention before you proceed. The crossed-out hand says this particular action is prohibited. The words underneath say what the prohibition is: not friendly, do not touch.
What interests me is the order. The triangle comes first, then the hand, then the words. A person looking at the shirt from across a room sees the yellow shape and the crossed-out hand before they can read the sentence. The design assumes you will be seen before you are read. That is a strange and honest thing for a piece of clothing to assume.
The sign is not the person
A warning sign does not describe the interior of the thing it protects. It describes the terms of approach. The sign on a substation fence does not tell you the voltage or the history of the equipment or whether the workers inside are kind. It tells you: this is not a place for your hand. The shirt borrows that logic. It is not a statement about who the wearer is in private. It is a statement about what the wearer is willing to negotiate in public, at a distance, with strangers.
That distinction matters in a neighborhood like ours, where public space is dense and shared and full of people who know each other’s grandmothers. On Whittier Boulevard, on First Street, in the aisles of the mercado, the default is contact. A hand on the shoulder. A ¿cómo estás? before you have decided whether you have the energy for it. The shirt does not reject that world. It posts a notice within it. It says: the terms of approach are different today, and the difference is visible.
I have been thinking about this because the shirt is funny, and the humor is doing work. If the same words appeared on a plain white sign at a bus stop, they would read as hostile. On a t-shirt, the exaggeration — the caution triangle, the crossed-out hand, the bureaucratic bluntness — signals that the wearer knows the sign is a bit much. The joke is the gap between the severity of the graphic and the ordinary person wearing it. That gap is where the boundary becomes speakable. You can laugh at the shirt and still respect the sign.
What the crossed-out hand asks of the person next to you
Here is the useful argument I want to make: the shirt is not primarily a message to the wearer. It is a message to the person standing next to the wearer. It asks that person to do something specific — to read before reaching. That is a small civic skill, and it is not evenly distributed. Some of us were raised to hug first and ask later. Some of us were raised to keep our hands to ourselves and say nothing. The shirt proposes a third way: state the terms plainly, in a form the other person can see, and let the seeing do the work.
In parish life, we talk a great deal about welcome. We put it on banners and in bulletins and on the lips of ushers. But welcome is not the same as access. A person can be welcome in a room and still not want to be touched in it. A person can be glad you came and still need you to ask before you put an arm around them. The shirt is a reminder that hospitality has a second half, and the second half is consent. The caution triangle is not the opposite of welcome. It is the condition that makes welcome honest.
I do not know the person who will wear this shirt. I do not know whether they are introverted in the way the retail title suggests, or whether they simply got tired of being handled. I am not going to invent a story about them. What I can say is that the design gives them a way to say a hard thing without saying it out loud, and that is a real gift in a crowded room. The shirt is a small piece of infrastructure for the work of being left alone in public.
The caution triangle as a liturgical shape
I will risk one comparison, and I will mark it as my own reading rather than a claim about the designer’s intent. The caution triangle is a shape that says stop and consider. In the liturgy, we have our own shapes for that: the bell before the consecration, the pause before the Padre Nuestro, the silence after communion. These are not decorations either. They are signals that the terms of approach have changed. The shirt’s triangle is secular and comic, but it is doing something adjacent. It is asking the person in front of it to slow down and read the room before they act in it.
That is a practice worth carrying beyond the shirt. Before you put a hand on a shoulder, before you assume a joke will land, before you decide that someone’s quiet is a problem to be solved — read the sign. The sign may be a t-shirt. It may be a closed door. It may be the way a person is standing at the edge of the hall. The skill is the same. The caution triangle is a reminder that the skill can be learned.
What to do with this
If you are the person who needs the boundary, the shirt is available here. It is a standard t-shirt with the warning-sign lettering, the yellow caution triangle, and the crossed-out hand. I am not going to tell you it will change your life or fix your parish. It is a shirt. But it is a shirt that says something true in a language people already know how to read.
If you are the person standing next to someone who needs the boundary, the assignment is smaller and harder. This week, before you reach, look. Read the sign, whether it is printed on cotton or posted in the way a person holds their body. Ask. The caution triangle is not an insult. It is an invitation to be careful, and being careful is one of the ways we love each other in a crowded neighborhood.
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.