the shirt

The shirt that started it all is black, has long sleeves (the left one has in a line running horizontally down the side the name of a band, NOFX) and features on the back a picture of a bratty looking boy holding a lollipop and choking a chicken. Beneath that it says Tour 94.

It's very large on me, not the size I might buy now, somewhat later than 1994. But at one time, a time I may have been more concerned with fashion than I am now, I found myself wearing clothes slightly larger than was necessary. I never wore my clothes ridiculously large, but there were a couple of years before I realized that I really just didn't like clothes that didn't fit.

The cuff on the right sleeve has almost always been about to come off. I try to be careful with it, and when it gets bad enough I can always sew it back on.

Almost as old as the shirt is my jacket. It's leather, from a store you may or may not have at your mall, a store that tries to convince you that everything is better made out of leather, but really what you want is that end of season jacket that's on sale so you can be like the other punks, or so I was thinking at the time. It was a gift from Momma, giving it that whole other something for me personally. The jacket itself is only of minor importance to this story other than that I always wear an extra layer under this jacket, one of which tends to be the NOFX shirt.

So I get to work and take the jacket off and then the layer, or maybe I was leaving work and putting the layer on and then the jacket. It really doesn't matter, but a younger coworker complimented me on it as she saw what it was.

For whatever reason this led me to ask various coworkers what they were doing in 1994, which we'll remember as being the birth year of this shirt. My answers were as varied as "in school" to "I was seven." Someone else was as old as nine in 1994. I was twenty two. I could almost have parented them, but even in the south that's asking just a bit much.

What was I doing in 1994? As far as the shirt goes it's its own little story. I was on my way from Charlotte, NC to Atlanta to see NOFX. We'd smoked some amount of something as we got started, and the something seemed to reignite some past LSD I'd consumed. I don't remember now why I drove, but the whole drive down was like a free trip. I quite enjoyed myself.

I would not recommend that anyone use drugs and drive. I was a younger person then and did things differently. I can't deny that I enjoyed the trip very much. I enjoyed seeing a great show, and to this day I enjoy when the winter months roll around and this shirt once more becomes part of my wardrobe.

I'm sure I've told lamer stories, but I honestly can't remember. It couldn't have been so long ago, but this is the lame story for tonight. I have an old shirt and behind that shirt is an amusing story of youthful ideas that one is immortal. It's enough to make a girl fish the tissue out of her sleeve.

ooh, baby, comments

I just published two comments from just over a couple of days ago. I keep forgetting to check my email, so I missed that I had comments. I should also blame it on not even visiting Blogger lately. I can't think of anything to write, and when I at least find a song worth sharing I find it so much easier to just click the Share on Facebook button.

Also, if you aren't my Fb friend you've totally been missing out on a wealth of Holiday music.

Yes, I didn't say Christmas, and I did capitalize Holiday. I think that's going to be my new thing. I will celebrate the Holidays as I see fit. I will purchase small trinkets and tokens of affection for a very few people. I will drink with you, raising our cup/bottle/flask/goblet/what-have-you in a toast to good tidings, to good cheer, to merriment, and most importantly, that ever unattainable yet always in demand, peace on earth.

I honestly don't care what or how anyone celebrates, but I was talking about comments and apologizing for having been so long in allowing them passage through the gates of my censorship. I'd have waved them through much earlier had I but noticed.

And then I mentioned the email checking I haven't been doing. At first it was just not having done it, and now it's the knowledge of all the things waiting for me, mostly Yahoo shit that I want to read and tend to enjoy, but it piles up if you don't stay on top of it. There are currently nearly a weeks worth of three homeschool groups, a local group based on a shared zip code, all Fb and Myspace nonsense . . .

I'm sure I'm forgetting something. I really don't want to bother, but apparently I must. And now, since I actually visited Blogger with a completely different purpose, I bid you farewell until completion of the next post.

I hope I didn't blow my blogging wad over this post. I really did sit down to write something else entirely, but upon arrival at the Blogger page I found the comments, and now we're back to that when I'm trying to stop so I can post and then start all over.

Shit.

I mean seriously!

there he goes again

Also, another commercial I hate is not a specific commercial so much as every single one that suggests that a home microwave and a bag of something from your grocery store's freezer aisle is comparable to something cooked by professionals in a restaurant.

They usually show a series of clips of chefs, and you know they are chefs because of the coats and the toques (the stupid ass hat that sits three feet off the top of your head and gets knocked off constantly) which suggests a certain quality one must assume. I can do the same job in jeans and a tshirt and busted old boots from Sears, but that isn't the point here.

We are slowly lead through a segment of that professional kitchen till we somehow end with a mother/wife/woman removing some sort of packaged product from her microwave. On some level we tend to imagine the corporate kitchen where all these chefs work tirelessly, creating each of these packages of foodstuff individually, putting great care and precision into each one. You open the freezer door and touch a piece of their soul in the process.

Or maybe we are merely led to believe that, without any real effort on our part at all, we too can attain a level of craft that a real chef works years to perfect, an unattainable goal that drives one to insanity at times.

I can't necessarily argue with buying food for convenience if you feel you need to. I get that some days the bag of pasta dinner just-like-in-the-restaurants-but-in-seven-minutes is the best way to go.

Just don't lie to yourself. And accept that the commercials are lying to you. It may not seem like a lie, and perhaps they don't come right out and say it as such, but you know for a fact that their food is not anything like what you could make or what you could order in a decent restaurant. And if your local favorite is serving shit that tastes equal to what you can purchase and nuke then for fuck sake find a new favorite.