So this weekend I told my houseboys that we could all go on a field trip. I suggested the Zoo. They said no. Then the museum - there's an installation of classic ball gags throughout the century that I'm dying to see. But of course, all my boys care about is fashion - so we headed to the John Varvato store in the east village, a new location where the legendary punk club CBGB's used to be.

Predictably, the place is dark and chic, populated by men with shiny flat hair whose ribbed torsos weigh no more than your average onion. Their pants hanged off their jutting hip bones, as though these lads were wearing coat hangers for underwear. I wanted to kill them.

It was there, however, that I found a Cheap Trick t-shirt that looked exactly like the one I purchased back in the late 70's when I saw them open for Blue Oyster Cult. It cost six dollars. Here, this "vintage" shirt, went for 750. I realized then that we had reached that futuristic moment shown in apocalyptic films - when excess reaches its endpoint and the world implodes. In Soylent Green, it was when Charlton Heston longs for a spoonful of jelly.

Maybe Islam has a point. Granted, selling and buying a shirt for 750 clams is not as bad as blowing up people who don't believe in your god - but by how much? I mean, if you fork out nearly a grand (after taxes) for a piece of cloth once worn by a high school student with cystic acne - then I think you deserve to be blown up. The bright side is, after that, the shirt will be worth millions.