We as a species have evolved to never pooping alone, holding hands through social media, keeping in touch with friends by sending them pictures while perched atop the porcelain throne. I too was maintaining my social connections with loose acquaintances while loosening my bowels after I punched in at work and my coffee had punched through. As I was dropping plops, and my thumb and pinky working in concert to entice a dopamine rush of watching other people have fun, an advertisement for a shirt had caught my attention: it’s like a 90s nascar shirt, but posing as a driver is Princess Diana next to her black Ford Escort (which was NOT the black Mercedes S280 that she died in).
Reader, I’ve yet to attend a Kundalini yoga class that has been able to replicate my lower three chakras aligning and sprouting forth the most hilarious sensation the way they did when I saw this shirt. I couldn’t believe someone would make this and even typing it out now through my digits is illuminating the area from which the deepest of belly laughs emerge due to the inappropriateness of the whole thing. Upon visiting the site, naturally they had a buy one-get one half-off, and found the DJT / KJU peace summit cancellation shirt, because, why not?
In risking murder by autopsy: I think it’s hilarious that this political blunder is memorialized on a T shirt. Now, I consider myself to be apolitical, outside of the spectrum of liberal - conservative, and usually refrain from political commentary, but it does not take much research to find that this mission of befriending North Korea didn’t make sense and was a lost cause to begin with. To remember this moment and share it with the public through the medium of clothing is hysterical.
I’ve had this shirt for several months now, and have worn it on several occasions, in front of a diverse array of folks, including family, including my grandparents. This item may have been procured through social media, but folks had a hard time being social in person around it.
I first wore it to a food truck park near our house. People definitely notice this shirt, and their curiosity becomes as visible as though their own faces were screen printed.
Rory found a friend to play with at the playscape, and the dad and I were talking, pushing the kids on the swings. Normal parenting stuff, ‘are y’all in the neighborhood?’, ‘what school does your kid go to?’ Blah blah. His wife and B come over and we all continue the light banter, and at an appropriate moment, the other mom asks, “are you wearing a controversial shirt?”
“Yeah, I bought this with an even worse shirt from the internet. I think it’s making people think.”
“Is that from when those guys were goofing around all friendly and shit?” The husband contributed.
“Yes!” I confirm, offering approval in the form of excitement. “They were supposed to sign a peace treaty, but it fell through.” I point to the pen crossed-out. “No sign, see?”
They nod.
B and I genuinely couldn’t tell how the mom felt about it, but the husband thought it was hilarious.
People need time to process this shirt. There’s a lot of text, most of it different sizes, “why do those dates matter?” “What is with the pen crossed out?” And even after taking in every single detail clinging to my hairy, sweaty torso, most people need some time to process how they feel about it. Promoting a political failure of a recent president like that. Does he have other shirts like “watergate”? Or “bay of pigs”? Or about the Ford Pinto? This guy would make a Pinto joke, he looks dirty and sweaty enough to know about that kind of thing.
The conservative, offended response is that it’s overtly negative, that if I wanted to be political I should show ‘support’ of something, ‘constructively’. That’s fine, but while my mindfulness journey has brought an abundance of positive influence, I still think there’s room for messing crap up, in a perfectly harmless way such as clothing one’s self.
It takes a long time for people to take in this shirt. People get visually absorbed into my torso, trying to figure out the catastrophe of this shirt. “Is this guy for Trump?”
“Why is there a North Korean flag on this dudes shirt?”
“Who are those fucking guys?”
At the airport was actually one of the best places to wear it, because people mostly had time to actually soak in the shirt and give a chuckle. Of course, going through airport security with visuals depicting North Korea is not for the faint of heart.
Also, people are looking at my body for EXTENDED glances. I’m a little used to this, being a hot dad, who must be so hot that those can’t be his kids, he’s too attractive to be a dad. But I’m essentially trolling in person with this shirt, and not everybody loves it.
My grandmother did her best to ignore it, my grandfather succumbed to his curiosity at dinner, conveniently under louder conversations between my mom and grandmother.
“What’s that on your shirt?” he asks in earnest.
“It’s when Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un were dating and they were supposed to sign a peace treaty but then didn’t” I replied.
“I don’t trust either of ‘em” he mustered.
Most conservatives understand this trolling, and may not be pleased about it. But also, most progressives will see DJT and react with anger, visibly upset at his image. No longer in a mental position to receive new knowledge, such that the capacity to recognize a joke is eclipsed by the anger stirred by the visual of the former president.
For fans of affixing designations in the house, for purposes of segregation based upon the differences in the complexities of our shared human experience, people can now be categorized by their responses to my shirt:
a) the blissfully unawares; the people who are too ensnared in the matrix, or their own personal matrix to notice anything subtly off about another’s wardrobe. These are who I think of when people used to use ‘woke’ as those who are ‘asleep’. They don’t mean any harm, they're just too blinded by television static in their eyes to notice your weird shirt.
b) the ignorers; the folks who notice something is wrong about the shirt, but who don’t want to get involved in the conflict of pulling the thread, so to speak. These people can have an infinite number of possibilities as to their motivations for avoidance, but since the whole purpose of this section is to judge others on their reactions, I’m going to say this is a combination of cowardice/laziness. Someone is in front of you wearing a shirt that shouldn’t exist, and you’re not going to say anything??
c) The people who notice and will acknowledge. These folks usually do a good job of obfuscating their own leanings so as to ask about the shirt with as much neutrality as possible. Usually, a quick, “why does this shirt exist, and why are you wearing it?” is enough to engage the both of us. I find this quite admirable in our society, and wished more folks used this approach in our day-to-day lives. Much has been written about how divided our society is right now, but no matter how any of us feels about anything, we’re all going to die eventually, and what does any of this really even matter, and can we at least go back to acknowledging others in public again? This is who I wear the shirt for. And for me. I wear it mainly to clothe my torso, but also because it makes me laugh, and I figure it might make others laugh too.
And if we all have an expiration date that is so rudely kept secret from us, wouldn’t it be more fun, to …have more fun along the way? This shirt may not be funny to very many other people, but it does a great job of making people notice. The important part is not that they’re noticing me. They’re not, until they’re trying to judge me about it. But getting people to notice something outside of themselves, and off of a screen seems like quite an accomplishment.
At the same time, I don’t mean to ruin anyone’s day by displaying these clothes for public viewing. I mentioned earlier the Princess Diana-car-racing shirt, and the reaction it prompted within me. As a connoisseur of humor for most of my life, I can assure the reader with some degree of certainty– most folks enjoy firecrackers/fireworks in some capacity, some don’t like them at all, but you should see the faces of everyone else when you try to tape a bunch of C4 together as a shirt.
One of the first (only) times I wore this shirt, I was with a group of friends who were mostly my age, but we had a hanger-on who would identify as Gen X. Through various entrances of friends throughout the evening, almost every millennial loved it. Our Gen X friend, who we all love dearly, genuinely pondered the Princess Diana shirt for probably over an hour before she decided to trade seats with someone so she wouldn’t have to look at it anymore.
This friend tolerated me through some exceedingly difficult times in my life, and really gave me the benefit of the doubt at every opportunity. Even when faced with something preposterously offensive, this person still gave an earnest attempt into understanding a choice I made. In the end, she didn’t feel obliged to agree with the humor, but we can still treat each other with respect and decency, even if we can’t do the same for the people on our shirts.
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