After months of waiting, it finally happened: the Seven Deadly Sins t-shirts arrived in two huge cardboard boxes that looked as if they'd been thrown out of a plane over Washington. I tore into them like Christmas. I'd been a little disappointed with the first sample that the printer had sent me, but this version looked brighter and perfectly lovely. Susan and I immediately donned them and returned to the office -- she to work on tasks for which clients pay us, me to gleefully activate my online store and prepare for the deluge of t-shirt orders that was doubtless coming.

There's really no reason for me to sell a T-shirt through the site: the profit margins for such low-ticket items fall short of greedy dreamstuff. And of course the more you sell, the more you must periodically trek to the post office with wads of shirt-stuffed packing envelopes for your customers. If I divided potential profits by time already invested in the shirt, I would come up with an hourly pay rate comparable to that of many developing nations. But I was curious to see what the site was capable of, given its respectable usage statistics. In America, enjoyment is typically paired with consumption, but my site had no consumables, no product line. No branding.

Besides, I have clients who consider selling goodies on the web, and I need to stay a step or two ahead of them. They had similar high hopes when I first tried the Amazon affiliate thing, and now I can reliably tell clients that they will almost certainly make more money if they spend an afternoon a week singing outside a Metro station with a hat on the sidewalk in front of them, provided they have a halfway reasonable voice. I don't mind these private failures so much as failing in public. Particularly when I'm failing on someone else's dime, and they know it.

I activated the online store link and sat back, waiting for the flood. Since this was my first experiment in being a retailer, I didn't go through the expense of setting up a credit card account; I used an online service that processes credit card payments in exchange for a hefty chunk of the retail price. This seemed like a fair trade since it meant no upfront costs for me, but it prevents my store from being the cool in-site experience I would like it to be. Patience, I told myself. There is ample time to develop the Deadly Sins merchandise line.

I amused myself elsewhere for nearly an hour before feverishly rechecking my pending orders. Much to my astonishment, none had come in yet.

I told Susan I was going to end up giving goofy T-shirts away to the entire neighborhood for Christmas. I could have bought a decent digital camera, my Most Coveted Object of the moment, with the money I spent printing the shirts. I was never going to be the head of a Deadly Sins product empire. I was a miserable, sniveling, pathetic, repugnant failure as a Capitalist.

At the end of the day, we headed off to a neighborhood forum being held by our local council member. It was all about DC's rat problem, and they were showing a documentary film called, appropriately, RATS! that was filmed mostly in an alley two blocks from our house. This film has been winning awards all over the place, and we're very proud that our neighborhood was sufficiently disgusting and vermin-infested to serve as its focal point.

Showing the movie was a stroke of genius, because under normal conditions you would have to offer me money and/or sexual favors before I would spend a precious evening listening to the latest developments in the city's ongoing campaign to nuke the rat population. Even the chance to see Mayor Tony Williams, who was elected on the effective "I don't smoke crack" platform, might not be enough to induce me to go. But a free showing of RATS! did the trick, so off we went.

RATS! was not the hip-hop urban nature documentary I thought it would be; instead, the film combined footage of our neighborhood rats with other human elements that live off of, or handle, the city's trash. It made a good case that rats are merely one population that has expanded to accommodate the enormous quantities of crap being generated by a throwaway society. We ceaselessly generate objects -- brand-name T-shirts for example -- because we mistake capacity for necessity.

Then the mayor, local council member, and a bunch of other people talked forever about all the progress the city was making to eliminate the rats. Having recently redressed a childhood oversight by reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, I was feeling rather charitable toward the little buggers. At one point, the council member crowed about how he was introducing new legislation to stiffen penalties for animal abuse, then scoffed "but I don't think rats will be among the protected populations." I thought: really. The human capacity to draw an arbitrary line between is and is not must be a fundamental characteristic of thought. Edge perception, even in a gradient where no real edges exist.

When I got home, I checked my email and was stunned to find I had orders for six T-shirts I was a success after all. My mind raced to the blooming future: hats next, or mugs, or mousepads?