My Favorite Shirt - John Wilmes
"There is truly nothing better than the hard-earned font seasoning of a college sweatshirt."
John Wilmes and I go way back. In high school, we spent hours every afternoon running cross country and talking about movies, music, and TV. I don’t remember having any conversations about clothing–not until later. We dressed like shit back then. Our jeans were
enormous
.
John is a teacher and writer and incredibly sharp thinker. Fine, I’ll say it: John’s my favorite Chicago writer. You should buy his new book,
Jad’s Dad Milo
,
here
. And while you’re waiting for that to arrive at your doorstep, you can read about John’s favorite shirt below.
First of all I want to be clear that I don’t think I have a favorite *anything*. I have just chosen one treasured shirt—sweatshirt, to be exact—in order to make this exercise feasible. My mind has always had a hard time with clean enough lines for rankings or favorites. Which is weird because I used to work as a sportswriter, a job that in its lesser iterations frequently asked me to make hierarchies and otherwise quantify, when all I am qualified to do is imperfectly transcribe the rainbows that basketball puts into my heart. Sportswriting was, in any event, the job I was really, finally, quite officially getting out of when I bought this sweatshirt.
In the Fall of 2017, I taught four English Composition courses, at two colleges. This was the first time I really committed to being a college instructor; a position I had been mixing on and off with freelance writing for an income situation that was decidedly Frankenstein. I felt good about this transition—still do—and as part of my new pride I used my employee discount to buy this already pretty cheap, clearly very comfortable sweatshirt from the Triton College bookstore. What I dreamed of right away is something that Pat understood about the sweatshirt as soon as he saw it; getting its font to fade and season. There is truly nothing better than the hard-earned font seasoning of a college sweatshirt. Orgasms, money, and oceans have nothing on how cool it feels to wear something over and over, for years, and see the positive results of its being so much more worn.
I don’t teach at Triton anymore, because its pay rates ceased to compete with the rates of other schools, and also because getting there was always an arduous process that involved taking the creaky Blue Line from Logan to Cumberland, and then taking a tragically unreliable Pace Bus south a few miles to River Forest. It’s a good and cool school, though, as are all community colleges. I would always rather rep a community college than one of the schools that pilfers the financial well-being of anyone it deigns to raise up in the world. Also the sweatshirt is really good for sleeping, exercising doing errands, and just straight chillin.
So good for these things, in fact, that it long passed out of Normal Use for me, existentially. If I wear the sweatshirt in a social situation—remember those?—or a professional one, I will feel like I am somehow not wearing pants, and carry on with an undue nude-souled embarrassment in the situation. If you see me wearing this sweatshirt in a more formal situation (again: a prompt for you to frack into your memories), something has gone wrong. I am too tired or too lost to truly compose myself. This is a sweatshirt for war and death, not one for the delicately calibrated occasions of levity that we used to know as partying. And because of the shirt’s yeoman nature, I have actually found myself wearing it less and less during quarantine; too intense is its relationship to my mortality, that thing we are all wise to avoid too much confrontation with until our collective air becomes more breathable.
This is all a regal way of saying that making a conscious investment in a college sweatshirt that has some kind of meaningful alignment with your worldview is a long sartorial tradition that I am now a part of. This one will grow old with me, get washed up as I get washed up. I will be less fit but more gentle and handsome, and so will be this sweatshirt. If you do a Google Image search of Jeffrey Epstein, you will eventually see that he is part of this tradition, too, appropriately sporting one of the American institutions most invested in reinforcing and worsening overall human conditions, HARVARD. That is as it should be, and for me it will be TRITON COLLEGE, a signifier of lowdown yet optimistic struggle, not high-up post-moral savagery, that ferments upon my chest as I slowly sink into the earth forever.
The first installment of “My Favorite Shirt” with N. Ferreira