It is a Tuesday in late September, and I am on my couch doing maintenance on my inner circle. The maintenance consists of opening Instagram, tapping the menu, tapping Close Friends, and scrolling a list of names with the focus of a woman defusing something. I remove a person I have not spoken to since […]
Author: Adam Boyd
The Root Vegetable Shirt and the Growth We Can Actually See
Four root vegetables are smiling. A carrot, a radish, a beet, an onion, each with its roots visible in soil, arranged in a loose ring. Around them, in letters that wrap the whole group, the shirt reads: LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW. The pun is doing two jobs at once—root […]
The Wolf Behind the Chihuahua: What ‘I Got That Dog In Me’ Actually Admits
The shirt says I GOT THAT DOG in cream letters, then IN ME below, and between the two lines a small tan chihuahua stands in red boxing gloves against a brick wall. Behind the chihuahua, a much larger black wolf-shaped shadow rises up the bricks. The wolf is not a second dog. It is the […]
The Cat Daddy Shirt and the Title You Can’t Put on a Form
On a dark shirt, the letters C and T sit on either side of a cat silhouette. Below them, in light lettering, the word Daddy. That is the whole design. No leash, no kibble, no paw print. Just a cat held between two letters like a secret being spelled out, and a title underneath that […]
The Three Words on the Shirt and the Fourth One Nobody Prints
On a Tuesday in October, the shirt arrived in my browser as a rectangle of text: THANKFUL GRATEFUL BLESSED, stacked in three lines, with wheat stalks rising on either side. The wheat is the tell. It is not a harvest cornucopia or a cartoon turkey; it is the crop itself, upright and orderly, the kind […]
The Dashed Circle at the Top of the Ramp: What the ‘I Had Potential’ Shirt Gets Right About the Ball That Never Rolls
There is a dashed circle at the top left of the ramp, and a solid ball at the bottom right, and the words I HAD POTENTIAL printed in white capitals above both of them. The ramp curves down between the two, a smooth white arc on what I take to be a dark ground. The […]
The LinkedIn Post About Failure and the Job I Left Out of It
The LinkedIn Post About Failure and the Job I Left Out of It There is a genre of LinkedIn post that begins with a confession and ends with a promotion. The confession is always specific enough to feel brave and vague enough to be safe: I was let go. I was burned out. I made […]