I wouldn’t want anybody spraining a retina trying to decipher the masochistically minuscule red text at the bottom of this absolute head-scratcher, so I’ll transcribe it (sic) for you.
THE RIDE IN MEMORY OF ALL THOSE
WHO FORGOTT TO LOOK BOTH LEFT AND RIGHT.
AND TO ALL THOSE THAT DID! JUST KEEP WALKING…
AS WE WILL KEEP ROCKING THE INTERSECTIONS
OF TEE CITY.
WATCH OUT!
So, putting all the disparate elements of this design together – and feeling like Sherlock Holmes staring at a table laid out with several pieces of apparently incongruous but abstractly connected evidence – I have eventually arrived at the following harrowing conclusions:
This T-shirt fake-commemorates a made-up event that ran, annually, for six years, between 1978 and 1984, before it was presumably banned owing to widespread public outrage. Said event involved “Dare Drivers” barrelling down “26th Street” with a deliberate lack of due care and attention, often resulting in them ploughing into crowds of pedestrians, leaving behind ghoulish piles of twisted metal and eviscerated flesh (as depicted on the spectral illustration behind the main text).
Those killed were then ‘commemorated’ by the following year’s carnage-filled Dare Drive, which generated yet more deaths, which were then commemorated by the following year’s Dare Drive, and so on and so on, until 1984, when the city’s residents finally decided – after six years of sociopathic automotive slaughter – that enough was enough.
Can that be right? Can it? Like the Koran or the Mona Lisa’s smile, this T-shirt is surely open to an almost infinite number of interpretations. Furrow-browed, elbow-patched, coffee-breathed scholars will be poring over this bad boy for decades.
