Something Stupid

You know how you download something and the first 97% downloads in four seconds and the last 3% takes so long you bequeath the download in your will? That’s what writing this book is like. In the book’s defense, it might be going faster if I didn’t keep doing this:

“I need to confirm that statistic. Let me just grab it online at this beneficial but dreary website. Let me just take a little break after doing such creditable and mature work. Where to go, what to do...oh, look! Internet cats!”

So many cats. The Itty Bitty Kitty Committee alone can hang its head in shame for the all-nighters I’m going to have to pull to catch up.

But this is not why I’m writing this blog. I’m writing to avoid writing. Some day, a sympathetic mental-health professional and I will look at this together, but right now I’ll tell you about my friend Veronica and how she and I discovered what I suspect might be a Great Truth:

All men have one awful t-shirt.

Veronica’s husband Jack works on sitcoms as an Assistant Director. Ergo, he has a wardrobe which would be the envy of any eighth-grade boy, consisting mostly of cargo shorts, t-shirts and cheap tennis shoes. Recently, one of his friends on the set grew extremely tired of Jack’s look and insisted she was taking Jack for a makeover. Within four hours, she made him buy flat-front khakis, lose the old-man jeans and purchase shoes from someplace besides Costco. I commended Veronica on having the kind of self-esteem where she’d let her husband shop with another woman and she snorted, “Are you kidding? I gave her a gift card to PF Chang’s for getting him out of those clothes. He certainly wasn’t going to do it on his own. She was firm with him.”

I sighed, “Could you send her over?”

For the most part, I wouldn’t feel the need to send Consort off with a female friend to get upgraded. There is one item, however. It’s a green t-shirt with an image of a smiling man holding up a mug of steaming something. The logo reads...

"How about a nice cup of shut the f*ck up?"

Isn’t that lovely? Aren’t you jealous that isn’t in your closet? Consort is so close to perfect in so many ways, and the frat-tendencies in him are barely perceptible but he owns that t-shirt and he thinks that t-shirt is funny. After years of wincing every time I stumbled across it in the dryer, after countless tiny-dramas when the t-shirt “accidentally” ended up in the trash can, only to be saved at the last minute by Consort who’d surmise my sudden good mood had something to do with waste disposal, we’ve come to an agreement. He may wear the t-shirt around the house when doing something smelly, something likely to leave a stain of some kind on the t-shirt which would thereafter render it unwearable. He may not leave the house in that t-shirt, not even to go to Home Deport where, yes, he’d be likely to find other men who thought that t-shirt was a hoot, but where there might be families with corruptible small children.

Speaking of small children, this t-shirt led to my having to explain to Daughter that the First Amendment meant her father could wear that saying in the house but it didn’t mean she had the right to use it in the house.

I loathe that t-shirt.

I’d pay good money for some young woman to look deeply into his eyes and say, “Oh, no” as she doused it with lighter fluid and briefly warmed the backyard. All of this, I told Veronica, who sighed sympathetically.

“When we got married,” she said, “Jack had a Chachi—you know, “Happy Days” Chachi?—t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He loved that thing. It took me eight years to get rid of it. He also had a Gumby t-shirt I had to hide because he kept trying to wear it with cut-off jean shorts. I tell you, I had my work cut out for me.”

Readers, this is where you come in. Jack and Consort are different men, raised in different states, great guys each in their own way but very dissimilar people. And yet each has, at one point, owned and irrationally loved a stupid t-shirt.

The question is, if you are a man, do you have a stupid t-shirt?

Do you know it’s a stupid t-shirt?

Do you care that the significant other in your life flinches when you pull it out, or is that part of the pleasure?

Do gay men have stupid t-shirts? I know there are gay men who aren't fixated on fashion but isn't one of the basic requirements of male homosexuality that you don't wear stupid t-shirts?

Do women have stupid t-shirts? Are the loved ones in their lives arranging to spill bleach on them?

Women, have you ever loved someone a little less because of a stupid t-shirt?

To what lengths have you gone to get a stupid t-shirt out of your life?

And to everyone: What’s the worst stupid t-shirt you’ve ever seen?

(Please don’t let it be “How about a nice cup of shut the f*ck up?”)