How many ‘business’ or ‘free’ t-shirts do you have?  I’m a t-shirt freak … I like a good t-shirt, but what really beats me down are the useless t-shirts I get from my company and vendors.  Maybe if I were still a poor college student I’d be less cynical about free useless t-shirts, but now that I’m in the six digit range, I care nothing for these pathetic shirts.

Occasionally I will get a worthy t-shirt and it will remain in my weekend rotation for months.  But the vast majority of these t-shirts are pure hud.  For example, the latest t-shirt I got from my company looks like a cheap United Way campaign shirt … it’s a little darker than powder blue and has red and yellow lettering.  The colors aren’t so bad, but the words the designer chose are dill-weed words … ‘mind’ ‘attitude’ ‘ability’ ‘fitness challenge’ ‘team’.  I can see someone with the intelligence of a 4-year-old wearing it, but not an adult.

An adult might wear this shirt if he were part of a team activity and he could wear it over another t-shirt.  Then, the moment the team activity ended, he could immediatly rip it off and trash it.  It’s the herd mentality … we don’t mind looking like idiots as a herd, but there’s no way in hell we’d be caught wearing one of these t-shirts on our own.  You’d be a zebra separated from the herd, hunted down by a lioness and finished off by a lion.

And so this latest retarded t-shirt may make its way to my closet and if it does, it will endure days of solitude in a corner … forgotten, useless.  Then one day, I’d clean out my closet and I’d need something with which to dust useful stuff.  The useless would finally have a use.  Once used, the shirt would be tossed with the rest of the junk or sent to a charitable donation center.

Eventually it will make its way to Central America where one day it will be sported by an 8-year-old Guatemalan girl who will use it as a dress.  Someday I may see this shirt again on a “Save the Children” TV commercial.  And finally a shirt that served no real purpose in its entire life will now have a legitimate reason to exist.