Flashes of Panic

I have a particular shirt which, by long habit, I wear when I have to get up particularly early for a workout. It helps that it is bright red, which may be why I picked it for pre-dawn runs before catching early busses from Pennsylvania to NYC. But mostly it amuses me.

It comes from a time when I participated in the judging of a t-shirt contest. It is a race shirt from an early-morning run (6:00 A.M.) at an annual meeting of the Midwest Nuclear Tester’s Association—the MNTA Scramble. The name works on at least three levels in that context (the breakfast meaning, the running meaning, and the “avoid nuclear catastrophe” meaning) which is part of why I find the shirt amusing. But that’s only part of it. The real reason I like this shirt is the design on the back, in big block letters with a stylized atom (a little globe of a nucleus with sunglasses and a grin, surrounded by orbiting electrons) replacing the “O.”

It reads, “UP ‘N ATOM”.

What, is it just me?

Now Playing: Ode To A Butterfly from Nickel Creek by Nickel Creek