When not working, the t-shirt is the official uniform of the American male. Once in a while, you encounter golf-shirt guy and he’s bound to be a dude that thinks he’s better at sports than he is and imagines he has personal style that he most certainly doesn’t. You might also spot the type who, in a casual setting, wears a button-up shirt, maybe a Hawaiian shirt and he will either be kinda porky or have grooming issues that he hopes will be disguised by a collar and buttons.

According to the code, t-shirts should say something or feature some kind of design, but you may still see a man wearing a plain white t-shirt. This, of course, is inappropriate at every level seeing as how the white t-shirt, being underwear, should never be worn on the outside. Society typically has a name for people who wear white t-shirts, aka underwear in public, I think they call them rednecks or hillbillies or trailer trash. The plain white t-shirt is the cousin of the plain colored t-shirt. The person wearing a plain colored t-shirt has his problems. He’s void of any form of creativity, his common sense is equal to his fashion sense (that being zero) and there’s certainly the possibility that he’s just a color-blind redneck who thought he had put on a plain white t-shirt. T-shirts with pockets are odd and should generally be avoided. Their only purpose would be to house a pack Marlboro reds and a book of matches and this ain’t 1967 so there really is no purpose at all.

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I own 117 t-shirts that bulge from at least three dresser drawers and sit in various piles encircling my bed. The t-shirt basically defines who you are and where you’ve been. For example, if you own a t-shirt that says “River Rat” on the back then people instantly know why your leathery skin is always a deep red. They will also deduce, just from this one t-shirt, that you have a drinking problem, that you consider Laughlin a high-class resort and that you are prone to screaming out at women, Heeyyy, show us your tits!

The t-shirt tells people important things they should know. If you went to an Allman Brothers or a Metallica concert you should make people aware. It tells the world that you are a man of taste and that your musical muscle is exceptionally well developed, more importantly, it makes it perfectly clear that you most certainly did not pay hard-earned money to see the likes of U2 or Guns n Roses. After the Metallica show, you may wear your concert tee every weekend for a month, but at some point, the novelty wears off, you see someone else in concert or maybe travel somewhere that is t-shirt-worthy and the Metallica t-shirt starts slipping to the bottom of the drawer – a tragedy really – and hence the problem begins.

The average American males scores about twenty new t-shirts every year, which means that over the course of say ten years, you will have to accommodate an additional 200 pounds of cotton. And since men only select clothes from the very top of the pile, really good t-shirts can go decades without seeing the light of day.

One day you start to wonder, Didn’t I have nine really cool Patriots SuperBowl t-shirts? and this causes an emptying of all the t-shirt drawers, which is the male version of pulling out the photo album and cruising down memory lane. The t-shirts are different sizes telling you, like rings on a tree, how big you’ve gotten. They have stretched necks and faded colors and some are soft and flimsy because the t-shirt industry decided about eight years ago that we should all be unisex.

Sure enough, as all of your t-shirts come out of hiding and fill up a small sea container, you have Patriots shirts that practically go back to last century, concert tees from just after Woodstock and one from a National Park where your family vacationed when you were twelve. One says Brady Is A Golden God and another says You Look Like I Need Another Drink.

This little t-shirt convention is like sitting in a roomful of old friends until you get a sick feeling … maybe I should get rid of some of these. You systematically evaluate each one … shit, this one’s in pretty good shape, no sense trashing it; I got this one as a gift, it would be insensitive to toss it; hey this is from the first time I saw Sabbath, a priceless keepsake; now this shirt here is from the oldest bar west of the Rockies, it’s a keeper.

People have fuckin’ spoon and thimble collections, why can’t I collect t-shirts? If there wasn’t this inconvenient need to have a job we could wear one every day. I think I’ll start wearing mine in layers or maybe adopt a mid-day wardrobe change so my t-shirts will feel more appreciated.

In a world where they say you are what you wear, I dig the people that are t-shirts.

Photo credit: Loz Flowers on Visualhunt/ CC BY-SA