Cameronwhitten
Cameronwhitten Personal essays, notes, and ideas worth sharing. Browse Latest Posts This is my corner of the internet. I write about whatever I’m thinking about: books, projects, random ideas, and sometimes my own messy life.…
The Caution Triangle Is a Sentence, Not a Mood
The shirt says NOT FRIENDLY in warning-sign lettering. Under it, DO NOT TOUCH. A yellow caution triangle sits with the words, and inside the triangle a hand is crossed out. That is the whole design.…
The Meh Shirt Is Small on Purpose
The shirt says meh. Lowercase. A period after it. Centered on a dark background, the letters small enough that you have to be close to read them. No animal. No flag. No slogan in a…
The Ball at the Bottom of the Ramp: What the ‘I Had Potential’ Shirt Actually Says
The shirt shows a white curved ramp descending from left to right. At the upper left ledge, a dashed empty circle. At the lower right flat, a solid white ball. Above it all, in capital…
The Ballot That Came to My Mailbox
The ballot was not the first thing I checked. The first thing I checked was whether I was allowed to have it. That is the part people who have never been inside do not understand.…
The Root Vegetable Shirt Asks for Two Things, and Only One Is Growth
The shirt reads LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW. The words wrap around four smiling root vegetables — a carrot, a radish, a beet, an onion — each drawn with its…
The Meh Shirt Is a Boundary, Not a Punchline
The shirt says meh. Lowercase. A period at the end. White letters, large and bold, on a dark background. No animal. No slogan underneath. No explanation. Just the word, set like a stamp on a…
The Jury Summons I Almost Threw Away
The envelope looked like every other official envelope that has ever found me: windowed, pre-sorted, a barcode where a human name should be. I knew what it was before I opened it. I have learned…
The Caution Triangle Is the Whole Argument
The shirt reads NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH in warning-sign lettering. Above the words sits a yellow caution triangle. Inside the triangle, a hand is crossed out. That is the entire design. No slogan underneath,…
The Composition Notebook Shirt Is a Costume You Can Read
The first thing I notice is the label. Not the ghost. Not the pumpkin. The label: a white ruled rectangle headed COMPOSITION, set inside a black-and-white speckled field, with a dark binding strip running down…
The Meh Shirt Is Not a Punchline. It’s a Boundary.
The shirt is almost blank. On a dark ground, centered, in very small lowercase letters, it says meh. with a period. No animal. No rainbow. No slogan stacked in three typefaces. Just four letters and…
The Ball at the Bottom of the Ramp: What the ‘I Had Potential’ Shirt Actually Says
The shirt shows a diagram before it shows a joke. Across the top, in white capitals: I HAD POTENTIAL. Below that, a white curved ramp descends from an upper ledge to a lower flat one.…
The Shirt That Says Root for Each Other. The Vegetables Are Doing the Work.
The first thing I notice is the soil. Not the smiling faces, though there are four of them — carrot, radish, beet, onion — arranged in a loose ring. Not the letters, though they wrap…