Greed, gluttony and $80 T-shirts

There it was, the old, familiar question with which every journalist has grappled. This time, though, it wasn’t in response to something I’d written for print, unless you consider Facebook a publication (is it? I don’t know). Anyway, I had made a snide comment on someone else’s Facebook post about how a certain fashionable Mill Valley shopping center was “where rich people throw away their money.”
The reply was swift and to the point: “Why do you have to be so negative?”
Well, the answer is largely the same as it was the dozens of times I got that question when I was writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, although I tried to keep snide commentary to a minimum in the newspaper. I would tell questioners that telling a hard truth, exposing corruption or describing how the Earth is going to hell, possibly in a hand basket, is actually a positive thing. That, I would continue, is because people, so informed, are more likely to try to fix the problems I so astutely observed and reported. In this case, I was just being cynical, but I contend my observation was accurate. I had been to one of the shops in that particular retail cluster (it shall remain nameless) and gasped in horror when I saw the price tag on a T-shirt I kind of liked. “Eighty fricken bucks?!” I exclaimed a little bit louder than I had intended, drawing sniffy looks from the well-coifed clientele.
I guess it is not really fair to allow the price tag on a single T-shirt to spoil an entire shopping center, but it did for me. I haven’t been back and, worse, I have found myself tending toward biting commentary whenever the establishment and surrounding shops come up in conversation. No T-shirt should cost $80 and the act of charging that much should have consequences. I am here, readers, to provide you with the information necessary to heap consequences on wrongdoers — or to at least ponder things in your underwear.
I am volunteering for this task because of a righteous sense of honor and a desire for justice that probably formed when I was young, quite possibly that time I ate an entire jar of peanut butter in one sitting and suffered immediate and long-term ramifications. To be precise, I vomited nine times during the night and could not so much as look at peanut butter for many years afterward without feeling sick. My point, if there is one, is that charging more than $50 for an undershirt is likely to have the same effect as eating too much peanut butter. Most consumers are not going to come back for more — unless they are rich or a glutton for punishment.
Why is this important? It’s not, but it was a random, tortured example of something that happened today that I thought might help me introduce this newsletter. As you can see, it will include news, observations, political and scientific commentary, information, events and random things that pop into my mind, not necessarily in that order. I might even write about the time I crashed through a plate glass window on a bicycle and cut my scrotum, but you’ll have to stay tuned to get that story.