Shirtman At Large

You caught that amateur terrorist, but you didn’t catch me. No, I didn’t have anything to do with the car-bomb in Times Square, but I did look around suspiciously, and I did take off my shirt.

Just a hot day? Hardly. Taking off my shirt was part of my nefarious plan. I will take off my shirt at will, and there is nothing you can do to stop me!

For I am Shirtman!

Yes, there’s nothing illegal with doffing one’s outer layers, is there? But I made sure to look around, not out of guilt, but out of guile. Those little looks, sure to be recorded, signaled my evil intentions. For I don’t take off my shirt innocently, I take it off in the spirit of evil! How do you know it is evil? Because I look around. The snake eats its tail.

Sure, there’s no harm in taking off a shirt, especially with another shirt underneath it. But by looking around and signaling my evil, the action becomes evil. The fact that there is no impact merely makes the evil more pure.

Of course it goes deeper than that. This is Shirtman you contemplate, fools. Did you ever consider that there might be yet another shirt, under the shirt I revealed? And perhaps another under that! I am actually a very thin and sweaty man. A very thin, sweaty and evil man.

So go on, revel that you eluded the obvious danger. Celebrate the capture of a madman. Laugh and sing, for as sure as sweaty skin causes ring-around-the-collar, beneath your supposed safety danger lurks, like a shirt under a shirt (under another shirt, under yet another shirt). You will never be safe!

I, Shirtman, the Bartholomew Cubbins of shirts, unshirt myself, looking around, dooming you to a world of malicious shirt-shedding! Fools! You are all doomed!

Even if a hero rises to challenge me, he shall fail. For I have more than shirts! I have a vest! I have a windbreaker! I can take them all off, layers and layers of devastation!

Your end is coming. It is a shirt thing! You get it? A vicious and evil pun, the hallmark of super-villains since the dawn of time! I join the pantheon. When the first caveman who ever wrapped himself in a dead animal skin first looked around and then flung his animal cloak to the ground, I was there! I will always be here! Looking around and taking off shirts! HA HA HA HA HAHA HAHA HA!

I remain at large! Actually I start out at extra-large, and then work my way down to large, and then, inexorably towards medium.

I AM SHIRTMAN!

--A haunting message delivered via T-shirt cannon to Dan Kilian from Shirtman

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