Every Shirt LXXXV: Death - Symbolic

shirt: Death - Symbolic
size: XL (EU)
vintage: 2006
provenance: catalog

Ordered at the same time and from the same source as the preceding Death album shirt, this one is similarly kind of small and also hasn't seen an excessive amount of wear. This is the main downside of having so stupidly many shirts (well, aside from having nowhere to put the damn things); even good shirts from bands you like can end up getting pushed down to the bottom of the pile, there to languish indefinitely. We're 85 shirts deep already, and there's more than a couple shirts that I used to wear all the time (before I started this project, that is) that haven't come up yet.

Every Shirt LXXXII: Death - Leprosy

shirt: Death - Leprosy
size: XL (EU)
vintage: 2006
provenance: catalog

Ordered with a couple other shirts in an order done just after I got back to the US, this is your basic utilitarian metal shirt. As the degree of wear should indicate, if I want to wear a Death shirt, I usually grab this one; I like Leprosy as a record, but there's a lot more personal history in the other one, and it also represents something that Chuck put out or at least had input on, rather than a pure label creation.

Every Shirt XXXV: Death

shirt: Death - 100% Pure Organic Metal
size: XL (US)
vintage: 1999
provenance: retail

This shirt was bought at retail probably around the same time as the Emperor shirt from earlier, towards the end of summer 1999. Death was still active at this point, but I missed their final tour; even with HammerFall opening, you go to see epochal bands because you never know when illness (as in this case) or simple insanity (see Dissection) is going to shut down your options.

This shirt also played a weird but yet significant part in my professional development; I did my first CS class in the fall of '99, and wore this shirt in to the first exam. One of the freshmen in the class, out of the blue, started ripping on me for the slogan on the back -- it didn't make sense until I realized that he was nervous and freaking out, and the fact that I wasn't, despite having no prior programming experience (copying programs line-for-line out of the back of C64 magazines doesn't count), indicated that my competence with this shit was not completely illusory. The last decade of my life has pretty much borne out that impression.