Do you have a shirt that you really love?

 

Discussed in this post: struggles we face; shirts; memory; live music. I hope the hyperlinks work for you and the pages are still up, there are some sweet ones here. 

My last blog post was almost 2 months ago.  My wife and I are moving into a new home so stress is high, even as we are enjoying much about the process. And our new home is wonderful.  I’m dealing with some hopefully minor health issues, but it’s requiring seeing a bunch of doctors.  Aging is getting to me.  It’s been really hard to “find time” to write.  As usual, this is the best that I can do.  In order to post I have to stop editing. Here it is.

The next paragraph is not what I originally wrote. That one just disappeared mysteriously; this word processor is freaking me out.  It seems to do what it wants to do, and what it wanted to do this time was destroy a paragraph.  I thought I could retrieve it with CTRL “Z” but it didn’t work this time.  Maybe what comes next will be better.  But man, I didn’t need that.  So here’s this:

A friend and I were hiking near our new home in Salem, when for some reason the topic of shirts came up. She told me that when choosing her outfit, a top consideration is whether others will experience her appearance as pleasing or not. I found that curious, and at variance with my own process of choosing.  My values are comfort, reflectivity (lighter colors on hot days to stay cool), and frugality (use the old stuff).  In fact, I am re-wearing T-shirts now that are “new” again since they’d been stored in my son's attic in Salem for 4 years during our sojourn in New Orleans. That makes me happy from the frugality and resource-conservation point of view.  But I do like certain colors and patterns, and I have always thought it was just due to my own sensibility, never overtly thinking about what others might think or feel about my palette. Since our conversation I’ve thought about this and I am determined to dress at least some of the time incorporating this new perspective.

I am going to digress, because doing so allows me to write like I think, which is kind of scary, in that you might find it a load of bullshit.  I do not really know whether it is (a load of bullshit) or not, and I am also quite certain that one person’s bullshit is another one’s ambrosia, or whatever. As is predictable, it’s a musical digression.  Probably inspired by recalling Donovan’s song I Love My Shirt while discussing shirts with my friend.  We even sang a few bars together. Click the link for the song if you want to see Tom and Dickie Smothers singing with Donovan, wearing shocking (by today’s standards) matching shirts. 

So if you dare, read on to discover my digressions.  I plan to return to the shirt question, and I really do think that it’s important and not just bullshit. When I wrote the phrase “so if you dare” it reminded me of a song by a Michigan band  called the Amboy Dukes, from their second album released in1968. Jumping into the rabbit hole of Google unearthed this clip of another band playing at a club I'd been to.  The Frost was also a Michigan band that played that song (Rock and Roll Music) as part of their show at the Cobra Club in Hastings, 35 miles down M-37 from my childhood home of Grand Rapids, Michigan, same place where Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes played . When me and a bunch of friends went to see them there circa 1968, this happened:  The show started late.  We were sitting on the floor in front of the stage, when suddenly the house lights went out, plunging the club into darkness.  After a minute or two, a spotlight revealed bandleader and guitarist Ted Nugent perched on top of an amp, dressed in a leather loin cloth and clutching a bowie knife between his teeth.  Snarling at us, he snatched the knife from his teeth and tossed it onto the stage, sticking it in the wooden stage with a decisive thrum as he leapt to the stage, launching into “Journey to the Center of Your Mind” (here’s a clip from The Golden Age of Rock and Roll, a ten-part TV series produced by John Bauman, a founding member of Sha-na-na seen here performing at Woodstock in 1969. The  TV series was hosted by John Sebastian who also played at Woodstock and was featured in the 1970 movie documentary. 

After the Amboy Dukes show, we and other teenage “heads” gathered at Reeds Lake Park to “get our heads together” before returning home. Clarification for young readers: head=freak=hippie (kind of).  At least I think that’s what happened.  We may have been to the Cobra only twice, maybe once, but it definitely happened. Rotary Connection played there too (with Maya Rudolph’s mother Minnie Ripperton on vocals).  I saw the Rotary Connection…..

Here something very strange and wonderful occurred during my time in the Rabbit Hole. I recalled seeing a band called The Rotary Connection at the Goose Lake International Music Festival . But that’s not what really happened.  I have proof (read on). 

Please click this hyperlink to see incontrovertible evidence of my memory residue confluences (events in the past occurring close together, May and August in this case, and becoming intertwined in the remembering).  Yes, that is me in the crowd, sitting to the right (in the photo) of my girlfriend Mary, who’s wearing the cool hat.  We are not at Goose Lake in August but at MSU in May. I will now quote Steve Miller: “Dear, Mary, thank you for the day…we shared together…” And to add to the confluence influence, I think that Mary and I went to see the movie Woodstock that same weekend.  It’s all a psychedelic late late ‘60’s rock-festival jumble. As an aside to this aside, consider catching Woodstock 99 on HBO, which chronicles what happened at that festival, held 30 years after the original.  I haven’t seen that documentary yet, but I have heard it discussed. Humans are so complicated. Maybe seeing it will help us to make better sense of the past and hopefully choose more positive futures.  And speaking of documentation (of a quality that I could only marvel at as I basked in it), you must see Summer of Soul, footage of another music festival shockingly kept from view for 50 years. Deep gratitude to Questlove and everyone else involved in bringing this masterpiece to us. 

Instead of contemplating the darkness further, let’s return to the topic of shirt selection.  As I sit here writing this, a package arrives from FedEx, a shirt!  Yes, I ordered one from  a company my friend recommended (The Territory Ahead).  In order to wear it, I will have to learn how to tailor it making the short sleeves shorter.  I will need to get a sewing machine and learn how to use it.  Since I am retired, this should be doable. So, I'm thinking of myself walking out into the world as an object of regard, of sense perception, pleasant or unpleasant.  Perhaps some would choose to be unpleasant intentionally, just to fuck with people.  It’d be interesting to know the percent of people who do that. Undoubtedly it’s more common to just be indifferent regarding wardrobe. I have friends who have 4 shirts, total.  I know them all.  I have more (shirts, not friends), but not too many new ones.  Old trusty ones.  I store a batch, then rotate the batches (sort of), rarely getting anything new. Right now that’s working out well since I kept a ton of shirts and stored them for 4 years while living in New Orleans.  Now, they are back in the rotation here in Salem!

I am going to be a walking piece of art.  This is the other insight that came from my shirt talk with my friend: we can be on display for the pleasure of others! Isn’t that a great cause, to be an object of beauty, circulating in the world. I am beginning to think that artists are the best selectors of shirts, at least from the perspective of curating other’s anticipated experience upon laying their eyes on you. 

I tend to come at this shirt issue from the point of view of value.  Top values for me are frugality, practicality, and comfort, less so appearance.  I’ve heard others say they find my appearance maybe more pleasing if my shirt is “fitted properly”.  This seems to mean tighter, which makes me feel worse.  I am annoyed every time a shirt creates pressure in the armpits.  It’s a pet peeve.  I have tried, but it’s just too unpleasant for me even if I may be more visually pleasing for others.

HOWEVER, getting creative, one could choose a shirt that’s roomy but also interesting and showy, fun. And learning how to sew will “fit in” nicely when combining comfort and appearance. The variables are endless.  I like the idea of considering others while dressing, of imagining my appearance as a factor in others enjoyment of life. That sounds a bit weird to me, like maybe selfish, but here we are presenting ourselves to one another, no way to avoid it unless we stay inside, and I am considering dressing with some new angles. Spice it up a bit, nothing wrong with that.

So that’s my shirt post.  I hope you enjoyed it, I certainly did NOT enjoy writing it and enjoyed avoiding writing it even less.  In fact, even now I am considering highlighting the entire thing and pressing DELETE. Ha! I won’t do it, because the enjoyment of having completed the shirt post is just too great. So once again, I get the great thrill of pressing the button: PUBLISH!

Needing some tailoring in the sleeves.