Hello blog.  I’ve been lax in updating you and the reason is simple: I’m cheating on you with Tumblr.  Blog, you’re great, but we’ve been together for so long that things were starting to get … stale.  So one night, in a drunken stupor, I stumbled over to Tumblr and said, “Baby, you got great legs.”  The rest is history.  And for a while now we’ve been fucking like rabbits.  And it’s been great.  The sex has been … really great.  Life changing, really.  And it’s so simple: text, photo, audio, video, it’s all right there, like a rack of your favorite sex toys just waiting to be used¹.

So why did I come back?  There is a long, complicated answer to that question, and there is also a really short, ridiculous answer.

I’ll give you the short, ridiculous answer:

I want to, nay, need to write a blog about my t-shirts.

For the past month or two months or perhaps from the onset of my birth in this blue-green world, I have had this nagging urge to write about my t-shirts.  Specifically, the retiring of certain t-shirts as I buy new t-shirts.  I don’t know why this is.  I cannot tell you why.  I have resisted, I have resisted so hard to write this blog, because it sounds boring, trite, ridiculous, stupid, and yet, here I am, crawling back to you, dear blog, so that I may construct a discourse on fabric that covers my torso.  That sometimes has funny pictures and/or sayings on it.

Specifically, I am writing about a Changing of the Guard.  My life is one built on laziness and resistance to change.  Thus, I have some shirts that I’ve worn for, oh, like six years.  When I moved to Portland I made this Decision that I would only buy band shirts, and wear band shirts around, and when pretty girls came up to me² they would say, “Are you wearing a band shirt?” and I would say, “Why, yes, I am,” and they would say, “What band?” and I would say, “Operation Ass Explosion,” and they would say “Cool,” in that way that hipsters smoking cigarettes in cigarette holders would say, and then we’d make out underneath a bridge but she would somehow be reading Tolstoy behind me at the same time.  I would know but I wouldn’t care, because I’m cool like that³.

One of these shirts that I’ve had for a long time is my Dragon Punch shirt.  Here is a photo for reference:

Actually that one doesn’t really show it at all.  Let’s try this one:

That is my friend Erin, she is pointing at me and probably saying “Hey, it’s That Guy!”

So there’s the shirt.  Very simple, I bought it online at some geek t-shirt website, and this photo was uploaded to Erin’s facebook on May 15th, 2006.  I still own this shirt.  It’s sitting in my closet right now, hanging there, looking at me like a dog that somehow gained the intelligence to know that it was about to be put down.  I’m sorry, Dragon Punch Shirt, this is the way it must be.

A story about this shirt: I once was part of an art installation.  The piece was called “What Does A Human Being Do When There is Nothing to be Done?”  There was a couch and some balloons with cartoon characters on it (no I don’t know why).  The piece needed a person to sit and do nothing, and so guess who they called?  That’s right, the Theatre Majors.  The people said “Act like you’re doing nothing,” and we said “Okay,” and then we all went there and slept because we were so tired from doing shit all day.  See, the art piece was a little misleading, mainly because if there is nothing to do, humans generally do one of two things: sleep, or go find something to do.  And since we were in an art piece and we couldn’t leave the art piece, we all slept.  Except for the weird theatre majors, they just did weird things like stare at the wall or do the splits of whatever.

Anyway, I arrived at the Boise Art Museum ready to sleep in my day clothes and the lady in the gift shop noticed my shirt and she said, “Why does your shirt say ‘dragon punch’ on it?”  She was a really beautiful Asian lady and so of course I stammered and said, “It’s from a video game,” and she was like, ohhhhkay and that was it, but the important thing is that she knew what the shirt said without knowing what the shirt meant!  I thought that was pretty neat.

The point of this story really is that I’ve had this shirt for four years and I need to get rid of it.  I mean, it still fits, it still looks decent, it’s one of the few shirts that I have not spilled food on, but it must go.  And so I’ve made this decision that whenever I buy a new shirt, I will get rid of an old shirt, until I’ve rotated out all of my old shirts⁴.

Then I found shirt.woot.com.  And it was like a baby was born without us even having sex.  And that baby was made out of shirts.

Shirt.woot is like what Threadless was five years ago: relatively unknown, but still pretty cool.  Now everyone and their got damn mother wears Threadless shirts, you know?  If I see one more dude wearing that Refridgerator Haiku t-shirt at a party I am going to haikick them right in the balls.

This is the part of the blog where I start to rethink my idea of writing a blog about my t-shirts.  I mean, what now?  Do I show you what t-shirts I’ve bought?  Do I launch into a diatribe about the philosophical nature of t-shirts?  Do I piss my pants?!

Here’s the deal: I bought a t-shirt that had a hieroglyphic-looking image of Mario, Mario Bros style, on the front.  And then I bought another shirt more recently of a turtle that shot down a rabbit with some sweet guns on its shell.  It’s a … reference to that … fable.  Yeah.

Oh my god this blog post is over.