T-Shirt Friday: Redheaded Bitch Edition

I have stumped for Donna Barr’s Desert Peach comic series here, but in a culpable omission, I have never mentioned Roberta Gregory, a drawn-book colleague of Donna’s from the same neck of the woods. I was actually seeking Gregory’s autograph at a comic-store book signing when I tripped over Donna in person, saw the Peach and got hooked. But I was there with my copies of Naughty Bits, starring Bitchy Bitch.

Everyone knows about Bitchy and most people have met her. She’s the single woman that the 60’s liberated and then kind of dropped on her ass, keyboarding away in some cubicle and putting up with bosses from hell and a shrinking pool of potential boyfriends from even scuzzier places. Her parents were on another planet, or maybe one apiece. Life pretty much sucks. Every woman, no matter how unconventional, has had a Bitchy moment or two in her own life. And anyone who grew up in the suffocating hangover of 1950’s America will recognize some of Bitchy’s flashbacks.

I save this shirt for days when people need to be warned.

T-Shirt Friday, August, 2010 — NAKED

Wonder how many stray hits that’s going to bring in.

Whenever I take a break from work, the way I did earlier this month, people tend to ask as they schedule their next appointment, “So are you gooiiinnng anywhere?” This is the only time I feel the urge to slap my clients; I usually just say faintly “Upstairs.”

This is about as far from the ranch as I get.

I’ve been returning there off and on since the middle 80s, mostly because it’s a short hop off the nearest westbound arterial and I’d rather split wood than drive, but also because, in a state that has become simply lousy with wineries, the place has remained refreshingly free of the hunt-country snobbery that greeted me frostily at the door in some other tasting rooms I’ve visited. People assure me that my experience isn’t typical — maybe I’m just unlucky, or maybe you have to get further out of D.C. to completely shuck the faint stench of narcissistic social climbing that leaks from the Beltway zone like a toxic miasma. You know the kind of thing: cute little expensively dressed girls proffering the wine with studiously fake smiles, leaflets for obscenely expensive “rustic” restaurants and B&Bs, canny glances sizing you up to see how much money you have to spend. Maybe I’m just a bit sensitized.

Naked Mountain, on the other hand, doesn’t dress itself up as anything, and the wine is good. The tasting room help usually wears some T-shirt or other, though not the one above, which is for sale in the entry hall (I’d been swearing to get myself one for years; the people at the gym need  a doubletake now and then). Right by the sale table is this sign:

mice go in here

So right there you know I’m a goner.

I couldn’t get a shot of the one behind the bar that says “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: IT IS DANGEROUS TO GET PREGNANT WHILE OPERATING A MOTOR VEHICLE”. (Non-US readers: every bottle of wine sold in this great land of ours bears a warning stating that pregnant women should not drink and drinking people should not operate a motor vehicle. This is eliminating the middleman, sort of.)

If you have tasted more than a few wines, it’s a good idea to amble down by their pond and let your head clear before driving. This year a strange local denizen was hanging out on the footbridge. I’m still trying to ID him. Or her.

We usually buy a few bottles, go to the next mountain over and pick peaches, go home, eat the peaches and drink the wine. No particular state of attire required.

T-Shirt Friday, April Showers Edition, 2010

If anyone were ever to invite me to a baby shower I can’t see myself sending anything more than a sympathy card.

However, thanks to my fave Donna Barr, I at least have something to wear if I deliver it in person.

Here’s the original image on Donna’s Deviant Art site.

T-Shirt Friday, March 2010: Can You Find Yours With Both Hands?

This shirt was another seat-back cover for a while, but I rescued it before it had attained macrame status. A good thing, as the clever saying is on the rear.

I picked it up at a massage convention in 1998, where I also sprung for some Jacknobbers, a couple of books on hand care, and a continuing-education course on massage for breast cancer  patients that I could have taught more competently than the instructor. That was the beginning of my resolution to take low-priced mail order courses that didn’t fuck up my life and make my fingers itch to get around someone’s neck. I can still remember that useless blatherer telling us all about everything except what to do for a person lying on your table who’s had a mastectomy, saline implant, lumpectomy or soft tissue reconstruction, all of which I’d already confronted by that time. My field is way too full of bullshitters.

Anyway, your piriformis is nowhere near your breasts. You will find it deep in your butt cheeks, at any hour of the day or night. Runners who have a sore ass all think they have “piriformis syndrome,” which is the only cause most sports medicine doctors recognize for a pain in the ass, even though you have also got the gluteus maximus and minimus, two obturator muscles, two gemelli, and the ever wonderful quadratus femoris back there, the last a dab hand at squishing your sciatic nerve, which I know because I tore mine once; and then of course we get into the people who think any pain in their asses is something called “sciatica,” which they really couldn’t define.

But it is good to know where it all is anyway.

T-Shirt Friday, February 2010 — Uncle John’s Band

I’m not a Dead head. I didn’t even know, when I bought this shirt at the 1993 Gay Rights March (see the last paragraph of this previous T-Shirt post) that the slogan was from a song and the song was sung by the Grateful Dead. If it’s not classical music, as a rule, I don’t listen to it, but oddly enough the two pop performers I ever play in the Sledmobile’s tape deck are Jimmy Buffett and Crosby Stills & Nash, who both covered it. So eventually I had to notice.

Your guess is as good as mine what the lyrics mean; but why is it that baffling, obscure poems are sometimes just the ones that make your throat close with weird longing — like the dreams where some important truth, woven into the random images and happenings, slips away with the last tatters of sleep?

I used the shirt as a seat-back cover in said Sledmobile until it shredded from sun-rot — you only realize in retrospect that something like this has memento value. It gave a righteous sentiment some exposure, and I enjoyed the moments when people tried to collate a straight married female woman with a gay-rights shirt showing two interlinked Mars symbols — I never could resist a little whiff of gender-fuck. Eventually it got folded away in the bin of things we all have that are no longer serviceable but remain part of our history. Two back to back blizzards will lead you to poke into bins like that, to make sure you’re saving things for a good reason.

I hummed the song all day long. I like the way the Coral Reefers do it.

T-Shirt Friday, November, 2009: TEEEE

My Albino Ex gave me this shirt, and about two dozen more somewhat like it.

I had several bungled tries at holding the hem so that you could read “Official T Shirt.” In Boston, Massachusetts, where the Ex lived till he was nearly thirty, that is the logo of the Metropolitan Boston Transit Authority, commemorated in the delightful political jingle “Charley on the MTA.”

My Albino Ex, born three years after the Kingston Trio lobbed this little campaign ditty to the top of the charts, had no such cranky recollections of the T. To him, he once told me, it was a magical sleigh that took him everywhere, and the sign of the T emerging from a blurred cityscape meant he could go places and do things whether or not anyone could drive him (he being legally blind, there was never a time when he was prepared to drive himself). Occasionally, when he saw it on assorted trips back home, he would point like a preschooler making the gleeful identification of “Truck!” or “Doggie!” and croon “TEEEE!”

At the T’s centennial or something they issued these shirts and he got one in every color. Then he found out there was a shop near here that would silkscreen anything you wanted onto anything that would fit on their equipment. He lifted the encircled T logo with tracing paper, and had it screened onto more shirts, pillow cases, a jersey knit top sheet, and a series of Supima cotton night shirts from Lands’ End that I received regularly every Christmas or as soon as the new colors came out.

I got rid of some of the regular T-shirts because, let’s face it, there are only so many times you can explain to people why you’re wearing a big T on your chest, but I couldn’t part with the eight or nine nightshirts. Cotton that quality is pricey.

Everyone should have a hobby.

T-Shirt Friday, October, 2009: It’s Friday Somewhere On The Globe

I find Nursemyra’s custom of T-Shirt Friday entirely charming and  I hate to think I almost missed it, but it has been the kind of week that turns your brain into a tangle of fried relays. I know Friday is over at Nursemyra’s digs but I’ve still got a few hours to go on the Atlantic seaboard.

I still miss my kitty, and will for some time, but I have mostly been reflecting on how good it was to have him. I realized I had never worn this shirt, which I bought over fourteen years ago, at a cat show I attended with the object of picking up a couple of carpeted cat trees for the newly bought and still-chaotic house. It looked more like my big boy than any cat shirt I ever saw, though there was no real variation in his fur color and his eyes were bronze. He did have that warming ability though. One imagines a huge vibration heard over the Great Plains, or at least I do.

I remember that one of the cat trees was kind of cumbersome and they held it for me to pick up later, but the other was very basic and since the cat show was literally just over the hill at the local high school — where we’d walked — I carried it home on my shoulders, out of bravado. I’ve gotten out of the habit of trying to prove things like that.

Go forth and scratch the ears of someone you love.

T-Shirt Friday, September, 2009: I Almost Blew It

It is painting week at the House of Sled (before and after pictures going up soon) and I almost forgot it was also the last week of the month. Nursemyra’s tradition of T-shirt Friday is a favorite of mine, and I had this one all set aside.

The weapon you see held in my right hand is a Hitachi Twin Head Massager, no longer available because of some complications with the companies that manufactured the patented twin motors. I originally bought one from the dazzling Momentum 98 supplier, previously recommended in these pages as an unparalleled purveyor of high-end massage gadgets, clunky Web commerce design, and enchanting New Age sensibilities.

However, as with all specialty items and small providers, sometimes there is an out of stock problem, and even before they stopped making these things, I had to go questing occasionally on behalf of my clients, who would get a load of the deep-throated vibrations of this thing wrapped around their neck or tennis elbow — kind of like a whale purr — and demand to know where they could buy one.

One year Momentum was out for a while, I forget when, and an Internet search turned up an available supply at Blowfish.com, “Good Products for Great Sex,” purveyors of fine sex products on the Internet since 1995, as I recall one of their other claims.

This was difficult for some of my clients, who balked at mail ordering from a business of this nature, to wrap their minds around. How this two-fisted pummeling device would function as a sex toy in anyone’s repertory was difficult for me to wrap my mind around.

Whatever, I found myself placing a mass order one Christmas with a company whose receipt said Good Products For Great Sex and plunking the half-grand total right onto my schedule C. If anyone ever questions this, I think all I have to do is exhibit the device invoiced. Most of what Blowfish sells is, as they say, the finest of its kind and visibly destined for its intended use, but you’d have to be like the “young girl from Mobile with the snatch made of Bessemer steel” to actually do something lubricious with that. On the other hand, it will totally whap your migraine.

The T-shirt, of course, was irresistible.

T-Shirt Friday, August, 2009 – The Important Things

I have several times mentioned Donna Barr and her creation the Desert Peach, who is my hero for many reasons, not least because he has his priorities straight.

Harlan Ellison once said that the important things in life were sex, violence and labor relations.

The Peach is more idealistic and votes for Love, Honor, Death, and Tea.

I am a Darjeeling and Assam woman, myself, though all tea is divine; I must find out from Donna what the Peach’s favorite brew is, when he can get it.

T-Shirt Friday, July 31, 2009: The Real Man Test

I picked out this shirt at the Animal Rescue Site for my cat-loving engineer friend to wear to the gym. On reflection, I got one in a smaller size for myself, vowing silently never to wear it at the same time; some things are just sickening.

I am quite high on this site. You click on a site-entry button and their site counter logs it, and this count total  is parlayed into donations of food at various client animal shelters.

I shop there a lot for gifts and garden doodads. Unlike a lot of charity shops, they stock merchandise that actually outdoes the market average in bang for the buck. Some time back I made them my homepage so that I would remember to click the donation button once a day.

I wear this shirt to remind me of the pledge I made when my Albino Ex dumped me: No more guys anywhere near my life unless they worship cats as much as I do. (You know how there is a certain kind of asshole that thinks it is cute to bag on cats?) I should probably enter further clauses about tea, Mendelssohn, and single malt whisky, but until I can contact my notary, at the very least you adore the smallest whisker on the scraggliest cat that ever lived, Buster, or I break your arm. Straightforward and simple.

Cats, by the way, get whatever part of the bed they want.