I wear pants sometimes, too

This is a meme that came from Sid at Keeping it Together. She didn't exactly tag me for it, but rather explained that she doesn't usually do tags but anyone who likes it can have at it. She's a half-assed but equal-opportunity tagger. So last night, after finally finishing up the barbecue sauce I was making (apparently reduction takes twice as long when you double the recipe; who knew?) and pre-cooking the chicken for the BBQ Chicken Pizza I will be throwing together tonight to kick off our Cabin Weekend O'Fun in the Smokies, I picked out two of my favorite t-shirts and took some portraits.

My Jack's shirt will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent any amount of time with me over the past ten years. The first thing this shirt has going for it is the fit. I like to wear clothes that I don't have to worry about if I'm around any open ignition sources, which is to say I generally don't do baggy. Plus, it really shows off my statuesque torso. Pshaw.

The other thing I really like about this shirt is that, for the longest time, I had absolutely no idea how it came all the way from San Francisco to be in my posession. It just showed up in my drawer and I started wearing it. I liked to tell people how its provenance was entirely a mystery, and my less mature friends (not me, I promise) liked to joke that it was probably a well-known gay bar that I was proudly advertising. So be it. My parents now claim to have bought it for me (they have been to San Fran), but I don't remember them giving it to me and it already looked well-worn the first time I put it on. I still like to pretend it was a gift from the t-shirt gods, a virgin birth of dyed and screen-printed cotton one starry night in my dresser drawer.

Shirt Number Two's history is well documented. In college, after I started climbing, my buddies and I would go to the local bouldering competitions/parties and pull down until well after our hands were bleeding and our tips were raw and then drink the soreness away around a campfire. Sometimes we won some cool schwag, other times not, but there was always a t-shirt involved. Mortal Combat 2 (a bit over-wrought, I know) was the last comp I went too, and it was actually a solo venture. Being the year after I graduated, my friends had dispersed, but I made the trip to Alabama anyway and did not have nearly as good a time as in the past. The t-shirt design was particularly inspired, though: a stylized Chinese dragon printed in glittery silver. It's really soft and fits well, too.

I was wearing this shirt and drinking $2, 24 oz. PBRs in a basement bar in downtown Boulder, Colorado when a guy with a foreign accent I've since forgotten came up to me and asked in broken English where the good bouldering was. I looked at him confused until he pointed to my shirt and I realized he took me for a local. I explained that the shirt came from Alabama, which has excellent bouldering, but I'd just gotten into town myself. I'm certain he didn't have to go too far in a place like that before he found someone who could help him.

And that's what I wear. Just missing the cut were "Andre the Giant has a Posse," from the Sand Rock Hoe-Down, "Everybody Loves a Southern Boy" (my mom loves buying goofy hipster shirts for me, along with monkey themed lamps and bookends; remind me to write a Mom post sometime), and "Spawn Til You Die," a shirt that belonged to my brother and I don't have the sack to wear in public, even if Courtney let me, which she won't.

And holy shit that's enough about my t-shirts. Who wants some delicious barbecue chicken pizza? We've got room in the cabin for four more, easy.