i basically visualize my own death every day

This is an old design I did but seemed appropriate for the official launch of money laundry which is happening on my birthday. This is also the design I find myself wearing the most, as a tank top. When I first started working on these kinds of designs they were drawings attached to what I called “paraphrased poems”. I guess I always thought it was impressive when people could recite poems from memory, poems relevant to a given situation, it seemed like a trait possessed by impressive intellects. As an actor for a long time I thought I should be able to do it but I mostly couldn’t and besides that’s prescriptive in the way grammar is. I guess to me the truth of a thing is sometimes in the specific language, sometimes the specific language shapes around the truth of it. Sometimes the specific language reveals a different truth present in the original idea, in its subtle way. Maybe like most thing more than one truth is present at the same time in the same object, and they can be complementary and adversarial, parallel and perpendicular all at once. Anyway, there’s a book called the Hagakure and it was a sort of diary, manifesto, manual of how to live like a Samurai from the 1600s. Here’s the section that I always remembered “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead” Kind of intense. I guess the idea is that only when you consider yourself dead already are you really capable of doing anything. Another book I like, one of The Acts of Caine fantasy science fiction series by Matthew Woodring Stover, there’s a hero at the center who is basically a human personification of a kind of multidimensional knife. An object of eternal severance, permanent consequence but who is also a person. They talked about how this character was capable of irreversible action without hesitation because he truly felt every action in life was irreversible. I am attracted to that kind of certainty of philosophy. I am romantically swept away by the idea of surrendering a clutchy possessiveness over reality, over myself, the way this philosophically perfect samurai would. I wished I were more like that, for some reason. But the truth is I am a mender. I believe the world would be a much better place if we were all more committed to repair than we are to some sort of trailblazing forward cutting. Still, I find myself drawn to the idea of the samurai. In my mind, and I think also in myself, it doesn’t present so poetically. I personally enjoy the Leviticus esque list of ways Yamamoto Tsunetomo imagined his body dying, but in my bro mind it really boils down to this. “I basically visualize my own death every day.” I think it still resonates with the sort of ice bathed podcast hustle stoicism so prevalent today in the manosphere and that to me is also very funny. I drew this samurai as well because it’s cool and the use of primary colors throughout the whole project, as you’ll see, well… I suppose that’s for everyone else to analyze but I think it might have to do with a kind of childlike quality I believe not only I possess but most of the kind of people this sort of thing appeals to. So many men are walking around with the same idea of manliness they had in kindergarten and I think that is both very cool and very funny, when it’s not destroying the world.

Prints of this shirt are made on demand, so it will take a bit longer than a normal shirt to get to you. In my experience a couple weeks is not unusual.