Making a fashion statement

I was dragged by my wife Saturday to a grocery store on Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta called Whole Foods, or as I like to call it, “Hell on Earth.”

The store is great. It’s always crowded, the aisles are small, and you get the opportunity to pay double the ordinary price for produce because it’s “organic.” I guess that means the farmers don’t use pesticides. I don’t really have a problem with pesticides. They call them “pests” for a reason, don’t they? So let’s get rid of them.

To get to Whole Foods, you take a lovely drive down a street called Ponce de Leon, which I believe is Spanish for “Where the crack whores walk.”

I remember when I was a boy, on some weekends we would get in the car and drive 40 miles to Atlanta, where we would visit fun places like the K-mart on Cleveland Avenue, which was the closest one to us. Then we’d ride over to Stewart Avenue and go to Zayre’s, and the Sears liquidation store, which I hated because it didn’t have a toy department.

Stewart Avenue has since been renamed Metropolitan Parkway, which sounds nice, but doesn’t mask the fact that parts of it make Fallujah seem like a nice vacation spot.

On these trips I would beg my dad to take us somewhere fun, like the zoo, but instead he would do what he considered the next best thing. We’d ride over to Hippietown and look at the hippies.

I don’t recall exactly where Hippietown was, but it was somewhere near downtown Atlanta. We found the hippies very amusing, with their long unwashed manes and their scraggly facial hair and their dirty, tattered clothes. And that was just the women.

Hippies aren’t as popular as they used to be, but I saw one in Whole Foods. He had long stringy hair, and a beard that I’m pretty sure was hiding some nesting bluebirds. His eyes were as red as a candied apple and he smelled like roadkill.

But none of that bothered me. As my mom used to say, it takes all kinds. But I was a little disturbed by his fashion choice, as he was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Charles Manson on the front.

Now, wouldn’t that make a mother proud? I suppose the young man was trying to make a statement, and he succeeded. The statement is, “I’m pretty freaking stupid.”

There’s nothing redeeming about Charles Manson. I have the same reaction when I see people wearing T-shirts with pictures of Che Guevara or Chairman Mao, or wearing an O.J. Simpson football jersey.

I’m not one for wearing clothes with other people’s pictures on them, anyway. The last time I did that is when I was 14 and I had a Farrah Fawcett T-shirt, the famous one where she’s wearing a one-piece bathing suit. Trust me, it was a big thing back in the day. And at least Farrah never killed anybody.

To each his own, though. I’m a believer in free speech and if somebody wants to do something ignorant, I say let them. Only in America!