About six months into the pandemic, I started shopping.
Haha, that’s a bald-faced lie. I was aggressively online shopping by day one, first buying masks and mask filters, then toxic bleach-filled cleaning solutions and outrageously marked-up Canadian hydrogen peroxide on Ebay, when the shelves at our local Brooklyn CVS were wiped out by hoarders. (Hydrogen peroxide should cost $8 for a container the size of a baby bottle, right?) Then I bought cloth-based comfort like joggers and fleece jackets, so I could create a soft little womb around my body. Then I got things to comfort my guts, like bags of shrimp chips and a box of fancy mushrooms from a restaurant supplier that was so gigantic, I couldn’t fit it in the fridge. (For around a week, we were king oyster millionaires.)
And then I started hunting for the T-shirts.
As I became increasingly feral—eating a stack of salami slices for lunch, brushing my hair so infrequently that a tiny dreadlock formed at the back of my neck—all I wanted were T-shirts that expressed my feeling of nimbostratus gloom and absolute not-giving-a-fuckery. I walked around in a rage against the machine, the machine being the government, the fallibility of the human body, and the 850 square feet of apartment I was pacing back and forth inside daily. So, partly inspired by my longtime love for the impeccably dumb Twitter/Instagram account dasharez0ne and partly by an old Scorpions T-shirt I’d bought months earlier at a tag sale, I scrolled through the internet looking for another dirtbag tee to add to my collection.
This was my gateway purchase, and it went immediately into Intense Closet Rotation, paired with secondhand pink track pants and huge faux-velvet scrunchie I’d found on the giveaway table at work:
I trolled the web for metalhead/skater/biker T-shirts so often, my “Recommended for You” tab on Etsy began looking like guerrilla marketing for Sons of Anarchy. The worse I felt about the world, the grosser the T-shirts got: I wanted ones with screaming skulls that said stuff like, “Raisin’ Hell,” and with pics of wrestlers screaming while they ripped off their *own* shirts. I wanted skeletons on a Harley flipping the bird as they rolled over a crushed stop sign. (Though I drew the line at anything that felt straight-up offensive or supportive of the 2nd amendment: The ones that said “We Don’t Call 911” next to images of shotguns were a bridge way, way too far).
Hesher-Americans will be disgusted to hear that I have no metalhead, biker, or skateboarding cred (aside from having a brutal crush on a dude in high school who carried around a battered-looking board constantly and dyed leopard spots into his hair). I can only name like two Metallica songs and I’m terrified of motorcycles. Growing up, the music that played in my house most often was Steely Dan; Earth, Wind & Fire; deafeningly loud R&B gospel; and—for one weird month—Yello. (My dad went through a phase with that song “Oh Yeah,” and I have to be honest—it sounds amazing on a killer hi-fi setup.) I’m from the part of Connecticut where they wouldn’t let the Dunkin’ Donuts downtown have a neon sign, because it would fuck up the town’s “historic character.”
Still, the shirts felt right to me. I was aware that I was appropriating a Caucasian culture that’s not my own—just a tourist at the Pantera show, stuffing earplugs into my head while yelling “IS THIS ONE OF THEIR GOOD SONGS?” If you cut me, I do not bleed Monster Energy drink. But I channeled my sense of doom into a love for the dirtbag shirts, especially as I felt more hopeless about my job, about the concept of “a career” in general (WAKE UP, SHEEPLE), and about everyday life. Instead of leaning in, I was apparently leaning into the void.
I’m on more solid footing now, meditating and exercising my way into an equilibrium that doesn’t require two nightly Old Fashioneds to maintain. But the craving for the T-shirts never went away. Browsing through them online—perusing their pentagrams dripping blood, the skeletons absolutely shredding the bowl, the “my old lady” slogans —still gives me a tingle of insubordinate joy. Society may be collapsing and control feels more elusive than ever. (What the fuck is even going on with the ozone layer right now?) But at least I have my gnarly shirts to keep me warm.
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This line is golden: "I can only name like two Metallica songs and I’m terrified of motorcycles." I went into a crazy online shopping hole, too. I personally think I've kept like 3 Etsy shops in business. My weakness? Vintage Coach bags and cute '70s-80s dresses because I could not give up the fantasy that I would actually be able to go out again.