TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: THE PLAID SHIRT I GOT FOR CHRISTMAS

★★★☆☆☆

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing the plaid shirt I got for Christmas.

This past Christmas my cousin gave me a plaid shirt. He had asked me what I wanted and I told him a plaid shirt, so when I began unwrapping it I was understandably excited. But when I held it up in front of me for a better look, I had no emotional response. I felt absolutely nothing.

There was something about the shirt. The way it looked was almost as if it was neither ugly nor attractive. I could barely even tell what color it was. It was as if it occupied some in-between state of existence, not fully there, yet not anywhere else.

While the shirt itself made me feel nothing, it was that void of emotion that terrified me. I felt all at once afraid and alone, adrift in the vastness of the universe for all eternity, unable to ever die. Drowning in a nothingness.

I’ve never had a shirt elicit this type of response before. I said, “thank you.” Then I placed the shirt down and tried not to look at it again. A few days later I picked it up, curious to see if I would feel anything. I did not.

I inspected the shirt and found that it was manufactured in Thailand by the Doug Ferry company. The name didn’t sound Thai to me, but I don’t speak Thai. I wanted to understand how such a shirt could exist. Did the seamstress who made it also feel nothing for it? I went to a department store and asked a clerk about it but he had never heard of that brand.

The deeper I dug, the less I could find out about this Doug Ferry shirt. I began checking the tags of people in front of me on the bus. Nothing. So I wrote a letter to the trademark offices, asking if they could please put me in touch. They never wrote back.

I decided to just sell the shirt and be done with it. Not surprisingly, no one would buy it.

If no one had any feelings about the shirt, would they have any feeling about the person wearing it? I put it on and stepped outside. No one I passed seemed to notice me so I began waving my arms and screaming wildly. It was like people were refusing to look at me. Like I was invisible.

I wasn’t invisible though, as I was caught by a security guard while sneaking into a candy factory to test this theory. I considered the notion that it was my khakis that made me visible, so I cut off the lower half of the shirt and made it into a pair or shorts. There wasn’t a lot of fabric to go around so the shorts ended up being a bit smaller than I was comfortable with.

Apparently the authorities and several witnesses were also uncomfortable with how small my shorts were, because I was given a stern talking to. Burning the shirt seemed to be the only solution. I hope my cousin doesn’t read this. I’d feel awful if he knew what happened.

BEST FEATURE: n/a
WORST FEATURE: n/a

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a head of lettuce.