Thursday, February 14, 2008
The First Day: T plus one
I can feel it coming on - can’t you? YES it’s a CAVALCADE OF EPHEMERA! Since that last post was about random stuff, here’s another one that really zooms in on the subject like only the borderline obsessive really can. And a special welcome to anyone visiting via OINY; I appreciate the click-through seeing as I’m just an “honorable mention” but an Honorable Mention with a ball gag from OINY is still better than a gold medal with a… a nobel peace prize… help me out here people… or not. Not, I get it. Let’s just have the damn essay already.
(written a few days ago)
Today was the first day of the rest of my shirt. Perhaps some clarification is in order.
In my t-shirt drawer I have a decent variety of t-shirt genres. I have unmarked whites and solids, some of each with imagery or designs on them, a few sort-of-nice-ish ones, a couple high-tech ones for exercise, and a smattering of sentimental favorites - shirts with great histories or potential but something’s holding them back. One of these used to be my hot-lime-green t-shirt from Hanalei Mixed Plate - it was a great shirt with a colorful, detailed iron-on that really brought back a great vacation, but I just couldn’t wear the sucker. It was too damn green. Well, a couple of years back I up and bleached the bejesus out of it. Since then, it’s been just as comfortable, the design on the back has been just as vibrant and detailed - but the shirt itself’s been turned a low key pastel shade, reminiscent of the sod in a well-used park in August. It’s a friendly, unobtrusive color and it suits me loads better than it used to do.
I gave the same treatment to another such shirt last week, a longtime favorite design-wise but a little too in-my-face as to hue: the blue Mr Sparkle T. The “blue” part of that description was an understatement - it was a booming vibrant color, like a cloudless sky above a high mountain - a blue that compares favorably to gemstones and mysterious pools. A beautiful color. A spiritual color. However, way too intense a color for a t-shirt to make it to my regular rotation.
The “Mr Sparkle” in “blue Mr Sparkle T” refers to the plastic transfer image covering the front of the shirt, depicting the mysterious cleanser box from an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer confronts a Japanese conglomerate that seems to be using his image for branding purposes. “Why am I Mr Sparkle?,” he plaintively whimpers to their customer service rep. The answer is less important than the question, objectified in the form of a spaced-out Japanese Homer on a box of household detergent. That’s the box on my t-shirt - a shirt that has provoked open guffaws of appreciative recognition at low-brow coffeehouses both hither and yon.
The peculiar thing about this particular piece of garment-borne graphics was that, being a parody of a Japanese product, it was generously larded with angular little marks. I assumed they were Japanese characters, but they could have been some other language, or maybe they were just total gibberish. They acutally looked a little like cuneiform to me, but what do I know. Whatever it was, it was unintelligible. Unintelligible gibberish on a too-bright Homer Simpson shirt. It was a great shirt, but it packed a little too much baggage for me. It was consequently not in regular rotation, but it had its place in the drawer and even on my back occasionally.
One such day, when I dared to wear the Mr Sparkle shirt, came to my mind a few days ago as I snaked a little bleach from the downstairs neighbors in which to dunk that turquoise shirt. I recalled walking down the sidewalk toward my home. I was wearing the Sparkle T; perhaps I’d wanted to prove a point to myself or perhaps I’d run out of clean clothes. They’re both reasonable theories. At any rate, there I was, treading the pavement as dusk drew down.
I’ve written before about one of my neighbors, sufficiently uncharitably that I’m loathe to link back to that prior post. Let me introduce him now, briefly, as if the canvas were still blank: He’s a friendly old curmudgeon, whitehaired and hoar-bearded. He hovers at his doorstoop, lying in wait for neighbors to waylay in a conversational ambush. He’ll talk to anyone about anything - and when I say “talk” I usually mean “complain.” The weather, the traffic, the mayor, pesticides, his health, the neighborhood, his dogs… he was perennially dissatisfied and expressed it in no uncertain terms: German by birth, his pungently accented diatribes were liberally peppered with crudities and harshisms of the most robust European pedigree.
His salty language and sourpuss demeanor would have been endearing if he wasn’t so intense about it that he made me occasionallhy uncomfortable, and so longwinded as to inconvenience me most of the rest of the time. He fell generally into the category of a good neighbor I didn’t want to see too often. His wife, curiously enough, was a small, very quiet Japanese woman. We sometime rode the bus together, barely speaking to each other. They both seemed like holdovers from some other, older world. I still wonder how they got together.
So I’m walking down the sidewalk, it’s dusk, I’m at ease and in my goofy turquoise Sparkle T. Karl shouts down his front stairs to me and ensnares me in an irascible rant and I decide to indulge him and just let him have his say, which he actually wraps up pretty quickly. Then he peers at my shirt. “What the hell does that say?”
“Oh it’s from a television program, The Simpsons, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it....”
“No, but I’m talking about what’s on your shirt.”
“Well this was taken from the show....”
“I’m just trying to read it… Mee - sta - ru Spa - ruh - ku. Meestaru Sparuhku? What the hell is that?”
The blue evening air nested in his unkempt mop of white hair and among his dense white whiskery stubble. His face, craggy and pink, was smoothed by gentle light that erased his creases and wrinkles; his eyes goggled in confusion as he flicked his gaze from my shirt to my face and back. “What do you know about this Meestaru Sparuhku, anyway?” His voice was almost accusatory.
I explained something about the program and the episode in question. Part of it got through, even if part of it didn’t. But he understood that it was a Simpson’s reference, and I understood it wasn’t just gibberish. There was more writing at the bottom of the graphic, as well, but Karl couldn’t make heads or tails of that part. It really did sound like gibberish the way he sounded it out, though that now seems unlikely to me. I’m sure it means something, even if I can’t be sure what it is. It’s a subtle difference, but it cam be an important one.
All this I recalled as I bleached the turquoise Sparkle T down to a dusty robins-egg blue. It’s a quiet color, easy for me to wear. The shirt was successfully dis-intensified and has been consequently brought fully into the thick of my t-shirt rotation at last. And so, this morning, I wore it to the gym, a place where I traditionally wish not to draw undue attention to myself. It fit me well, it felt soft and absorbent, it had a hilarious graphic on the front. But most of all, for the first time, it didn’t shout its presence from across the room with its overly-aggressive pallette. Then again, for the first time, had it been screaming, I’d have actually had some idea what it was trying to say. Partly, anyway. I think that’s decent progress considering where we started. The new era of the Sparkle T has begun. Today is the first day. This is where you came in.