Notes From The Gutter

What’s in a T-shirt?

 

Free Thinking Republicans,

Sometimes I get so baffled to see what messages we carry around town. To be precise, I mean the inscriptions on our vehicles, hangings, and clothes, chiefly T-shirts.

It has, therefore, become a hobby that when I see a T-shirt with text on it, I take a good gaze you might think my interest is way deeper than the cloth.

Today I will share part of the collection that I can quickly remember without going to the little notebook in which I scribble down crazy lines.

Somewhere in Lunzu on my way to Lilongwe from Blantyre at the weekend, a lorry laden with sand for construction holds the queue as it struggles to go up an ascent.

In that jam, I end up close to a red VW Polo in front of me and my eyes fall on a sticker that boasts a crude message; ‘Don’t get too close –I’m kissing your spouse!’

I quickly call home and verify that my spouse was very home so many kilometres away, and not in that offending bastard’s vehicle. You can guess the satisfaction I had when, once a chance came up, I rocketed past the Polo and enjoyed seeing it in my rear view mirror.

At Kawale Health Centre, there was this woman placidly going about her business on a concrete bench. She was busy breastfeeding her little baby girl.

I admired the motherly love going on until I got past and around her when a glance over my shoulder landed on the inscription on the back of her T-shirt; ‘Ask my Husband—I’m a virgin.

Well, I trusted her outright and there was no need to check with the hubby.

At Bingu National Stadium as the Nomads hammered Big Bullets in the recently concluded Bus Ipite football bonanza, one noisy supporter wore a T-shirt that announces; ‘I’m feeling good in my wife’s thong.’

Perhaps it explained his untiring support for the Blue side of the game.

And recently, somewhere around Malangalanga, a lady vendor is in a hoodie with a sinister advert at the back; ‘butt for free, boobs at a fee’.

I guess there should have been a clue on the fee, just in case ‘buyers’ would show up.

Fellow sons and daughters of this land, such is the extent of our freedoms that we can say what we want to say, even without opening our mouths or not knowing what message or impression the inscriptions are really putting across.

I don’t have a problem with those that mean what they wear—as in deliberately picking the clothes with messages from off a kaunjika pile.

What kills me dead is when you approach someone and from them you learn they never knew at all what the text meant.

You should have seen how the  ‘butt for free, boobs at a fee’ lady quickly shoved the hoodie into her bag the moment some guy and I helped her understand what message she had been carrying around.

Sometimes, we are just vulnerable souls betrayed by our queer tastes or ignorance. n

 

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