Pinkerton's Weblog

Personal Visions of Hell (And Other Fun-Filled Conversation Starters...)

It occured to me in the shower today that most of my hatreds seem to be pop-culture based (I offer no explanations for why this would have occured to me in the shower). So, while someone's vision of Hell from three hundred years ago might have been an eternity of rat bites, or an eternity of being flayed alive or something, my vision of Hell involves an eternity of watching David Lynch movies while Geddy Lee sings in my ear. No less frightening or painful, certainly. Still, I should really get a few non entertainment-based visions of Hell.

$14.99 Shirt-and-Tie Combo

Money got exceptionally tight this past weekend. An out-of-the-blue call from Rogers Cable – wondering philosophically if I ever, in fact, intended on paying them money, followed by the hope that I could find a few good books by Thursday, as they would be cutting off my services then -- left me racing to make a sudden payment, reducing my chequing account to a handful of dollars.

I withdrew the meagre funds I’d been left with and bought what necessities I needed to continue living until I got paid again the following Friday. White bread and peanut butter, for instance, would supply lunches for the week. Chicken legs and rice made for a cost-effective five day's worth of suppers. I then scrounged up a final two dollars and change with which to get some laundry done. With the two non-negotiable expenses taken care of – eating and not stinking – I was ready to face the week.

An unexpected snag presented itself on Sunday evening, when I gathered up a basketful of dirty shirts and pants for a trip to the laundromat. Only then did I realize I’d actually used up the last of my Tide the week before. With all of two dollars and seventy-five cents in coins as the sum total of my available “mad money”, there was no way that I could think of to buy a new $8 container of detergent. I supposed I could go to the laundromat and purchase one of those individually packed mini-Tide packs, which are only a couple of bucks. But to do that, I’d have to spend the money I needed to actually make the washing machine start after I’d applied the crystals. I had two choices: washing a load of laundry with no soap, or letting a load of laundry, soap included, sit unwashed in a tumbler. Neither sounded very sensible. It was time for Plan C.

Finding clean pants wasn’t a huge obstacle, as I had a few suits hanging in my closet. It was the shirt department that had me panicking. My existing work shirts were pretty dirty, smelling of hard work and stress as they did from a week’s worth of wear. Some had stains from a hasty lunch.

On Monday morning I grabbed the least offensive looking of the shirts, ironed the shit out of it, and was pleased enough with the results I saw in the mirror to brave showing up to work. On Tuesday I took the second-least offensive shirt, ironed the shit out of this also, and managed to skate through another day laundryless.

By this morning I had run out of unoffensive shirts. It was crunch time. I waded deep into the recesses of my closet, looking for a shirt I might have bought, not liked, and tossed in the back. The deeper in I waded, the further back in time I went – at one point I stumbled on an old Metallica/Guns N’ Roses 1991 World Tour t-shirt I didn’t even know I still had.

Finally, with time running out, I spotted a hidden cache of dress shirts deep in the back. I pulled out one and held it up in front of me: a shiny dark purple shirt that, even in the dim half-light of my closet, glowed with an odd luminescence. It was immediately clear to me why I’d not liked the shirt to begin with, and had banished it to the dark reaches of my closet space. What wasn’t clear was why I hadn’t just thrown it out in the first place. I would never, ever wear this shirt, having as it did the power to make your eyes water when you looked directly at it. While it might be useful for not getting called on at meetings, it would prove ineffective at convincing anybody I wasn’t a gay circus clown. I would sooner wear a barrel. The search continued.

Just about ready to give up, I stumbled on another treasure I’d forgotten about: a cheap-looking shirt-and-tie set I’d gotten for Christmas the previous year. My immediate family of uncles and aunts does a yearly name swap at the holidays, so that everyone has to buy a gift for only one other person. It’s a cost effective way to do it, and means you’ll get and receive one $20 gift, rather than 40 fifty cent ones. The year past, I’d gotten a flat grey shirt and tie combo from an uncle, which frightened me considerably. I knew of no well-made dress shirts that cost only $20, and certainly none that came with a tie included. I thanked him for the gift, put it aside, and – when I eventually made it back to my apartment after the holidays – skipped it like a stone into my closet, confident I’d never be that desperate for clothes.

I was now that desperate for clothes. I tore open the package and examined it with an optimistic eye. I noted that the price tag, still affixed to the bottom of the package, read only $14.99. I wondered which composed the majority of the price: the shirt, or the tie? Either way, the tie had to go. Not only was it the exact same colour as the shirt, but it was also quite possibly the same material.

The shirt though – it was kind of cheap-looking. But not THAT cheap-looking, at least not when separated from the tie. It also had some pretty hard-looking grooves in it, from having spent almost a year folded and in its package at the bottom of my closet.

I ironed the shit out of it. When I finished, I ironed the shit out of it again. I examined myself in the mirror. It would work. I had Wednesday covered.

Thursday and Friday loom menacingly on the horizon.

___

The No-Shirt Dilemma: The Saga Continues...

or...

No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem

Me: [wearing grey sweater and black dress pants, feeling pretty proud of myself]

Co-worker: "Hey, not shirt and tieing it today, Jay?"

Me: [frozen, thinking] "Uh... well... am I the only guy here who doesn't celebrate Halloween?"

Co-worker: [dubious] "That's a costume?"

Me: "Sure."

Co-worker: "What are you supposed to be?"

Me: [thinking frantically] "Um. The...ghost...of... Mister Rogers?"

Co-worker: "Oh."

[pause]

Co-worker: "Good costume."