So there is a research firm out there that was willing to pay me $400 for four and a half hours of opinions on electric vehicles. These people are fools, because I have opinions for a lot longer than that for no charge whatsoever (as the almost 17 years of this very blog will confirm…and the notion I’ve recorded a third of my life here is a whole lot of “Of Which More Later”), but it took very little time for me to turn around and hand that cash over to American Giant for a fleece zip-up and three of their new Everest T-shirts.
The fleece has been on my list for a while since it was announced. My employer has given me damn near half a dozen fleeces in the last four years, and I have given them all away to the homeless wherever possible. But this one is American made and does not come with any branding from an employer with whom my relationship is charitably described as “troubled”. I did enjoy the North Face fleece that was my first garment from them, and the last one I disposed of, and I think that’s why I took the plunge to buy this one. Good extra layer, goes under the M-65 or can be stashed in the trunk, whatever. That’s not the big thing.
The Everest T was advertised in the paper catalog months before it became available to order. It is a loosely-cut crewneck T, optimized as a main shirt rather than undergarment later. But the unique selling point of the Everest T is that it is 15.2 oz cotton. By comparison, a typical “heavyweight” T is about 8 ounces per square foot. The super-hardcore manly-man “cotton armor iron wear” sort of work T generally tops out at 10 or 11 ounces. Fifteen ounce cotton is usually associated with terms like “canvas”. It is, hands down, the heaviest T-shirt I have ever owned and arguably the heaviest shirt by fabric weight I have ever owned.
And it is magnificent. The white one – which I bought when I thought no other colors were on offer – looks like something off the cover of a Springsteen album. I only need the one; the other two in a sage green and a light rye color are far more suitable for daily use. They wear like a weighted blanket for the torso. It feels like the T-shirt that’s been missing my entire life, the final replacement for those couple of American Apparel Vermont Army T’s bought back in the Apple days and jealously guarded ever since. It sounds insane to pay $60 for a t-shirt, but when it feels like a T-shirt you can genuinely wear and have for the rest of your life…there you go.
And that’s been the metric for quite some time. I don’t have any problem spending money on something I plan to have and use for the rest of my days. It’s what makes me antsy about buying the Nokia 2780, no matter how tempting it is to have a modern LTE flip phone – because it can’t possibly last more than four or five years until LTE frequencies start getting replaced with 5G, and it’s a random gimmick. It would make more sense to save that $90 and put it on an Apple Watch Ultra, which would have a bigger screen, a bigger battery and the kind of cellular connectivity to use it as the shutdown-night phone…which would itself only be good for what, five years? Tops? My Apple Watch Series 6 is not particularly long in the tooth, and a battery replacement would see it working well for the foreseeable future, so how can I justify dropping that kind of cash? Against that, $500 for a custom lightsaber seems less frivolous than $800 for a five-year watch.
And this is what made me think about Star Wars, and how Star Wars is basically a scarcity economy. Things get repaired, get mended, get used for decades or centuries. They have advanced technology, but they don’t have plenty, and it shows. Rey is using a lightsaber her mentor’s father built fifty years earlier. Han and Leia are honeymooning on a three hundred year old starship. I can’t buy a damn phone without being required to replace it in five years because I either can’t get the frequency coverage I need or can’t plug it into the new laptop or because it’s not getting operating system updates any longer.
Now if someone wants to give me a flip phone with a removable battery and a replaceable cellular module to keep up with 5G, 6G, whatever it takes, and it could be made up-to-date for shutdown night for ten, fifteen, twenty years as the phone of last resort? Then we could talk. But for now, that’s money that could go on another Everest T that will last me the rest of my life.