Howard never liked shopping. Not for anything, but particularly not for clothes. He had always thought it to be a waste of his time. Every so often he found himself obligated to shop though, and it was at these times that he left his house with the full intention to come back as soon as possible. He’d take public transportation (he never liked driving either), arrive at the nearest shopping center, buy what he needed and leave before he felt that he had been somehow polluted with some sort of malicious virus that seemed to define consumerism. In other words, Howard was not a very good American.
One day he went into fitting room with a shirt he had picked out at random. He seemed sure that this particular shirt looked fine on him and, seeing as how it hugged his figure quite well, decided to go pay for it. As he was exiting the fitting room, a particularly beautiful woman came up to him and told him that the shirt did not look good on him. Howard, not willing to shop again for another shirt, told her that it looked great and that she should mind her own business. Lisa, the girl, took great offense to Howard’s shrewd manner, and Howard replied that it was Lisa who was being a shrew. What gave her the right to tell perfect strangers what clothes they should or should not wear? He thought he looked perfectly fine in the shirt and she had no right to intervene with any sort of opinion. Clearly Howard was not a woman pleaser. Lisa, exasperated, tried to point out to Howard that she would not have said anything had the shirt not looked so utterly ridiculous on him. Ignoring her, and now clearly exasperated himself, Howard went to the cash register and paid for his new shirt. So sure of himself he was that he decided to buy the store’s entire stock of the shirt and then went out and bought every store’s stock of the shirt. Soon, the only shirt Howard owned was that ugly Hawaiian shirt with the little leaves on it. All his credit cards were maxed out and it would be a long time before he even set foot in a store to buy anything again, let alone shirts.
One day, while walking down the street, Howard bumped into Lisa wearing the only type of shirt he owned. She asked him how he was doing and he was quite surprised that she didn’t decide to ignore the casual encounter. A bit of chit chat revealed that Howard had not been intimate with a woman in a very long time, and thus he did not believe that his shirt preference had anything to do with the matter because he’d been wearing a variety of other shirts other times that he’d been rejected. Lisa, taking a good long hard look at him, expressed that she thought that perhaps he was right and indeed he could not look much better in anything else. Dismayed, Howard went home and cried into his many pillows, all of which were adorned with the same shirt he was wearing.
Many years passed until Howard was able to pay back his credit card debt. When he finally did, a few more months passed and finally the last of his ugly Hawaiian shirts became completely unwearable. The time that he disliked the most had come again. So, like many years before, Howard got on the nearest form of public transportation, went into the nearest clothing store and picked out a shirt his size completely at random and tried it on.
While in the fitting room he heard shooting outside. He was afraid of going out so he just let the terrorists destroy the store. After a while the shooting stopped and Howard looked outside to see if he could find any sign of life. The struggle had taken out almost every person working or visiting the mall. The guards were dead, the people who work at the counters were dead, even the people who sell various types of ice cream at the entrance had been killed. The police hadn’t arrived yet and Howard found himself the only person at all in the entire mall. Feeling pragmatic, and having absolutely no sympathy or empathy for the pain of others, Howard went into his chosen clothing store and took out every single shirt they owned in his size.
When he got home he tried on every single one of them and took a picture. After an extensive search for Lisa on the internet, he was able to find her email address. That very night her email was flooded with pictures of Howard wearing one shirt after another in an effort to prove to her that he could indeed look better wearing something else.
She liked the navy blue one with drawings of parakeets on it.
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