Hey hey hey, guess who’s selling t-shirts?

Old Soul Productions, the little company I have that produces The Morning Jones, has started selling merchandise. You can get on our first product and have your very own #BEATEMDOWN t-shirt sent to your home. You can order the shirts at BEATEMDOWN2011.COM. While you may not listen to the show, we think we came up with a design that is both fashionable and speaks to some of the things we’ve been working on. Not that your immense support hasn’t been enough already, but we thank you in advance for helping with this initiative.

(OK, “we” is “me,” but I’ll explain more on that later.)

Anyway, check em out…

Stylish, don’t you agree?

Anyway, many people have asked me where #BEATEMDOWN comes from. Time to get Sophia with it…

Picture it. Houston, 1991.

I’m at the house watching Texas and Miami play in the Cotton Bowl with my brother and father. For reasons that won’t be hard to glean, they loved Miami. Unlike them, I was growing up in Texas, so I’d picked my side. I didn’t tell anyone, but I had chosen.

Anyone who saw that game has to remember it as the single most embarrassing, demoralizing defeat one team has ever suffered. When someone gets knocked out cold on the opening kickoff, and thing still somehow manage to get worse, we’ve got a first class debacle.

As the hits, points and personal fouls piled up, you could only hear one sound in our house…

BEAT EM DOWN!

See, you must understand: while most people enjoy a riveting close game, Mack Jones is a big fan of blowouts. He doesn’t like the anxiety. He likes to rejoice in every single point. My brother does, too. As do I.

However, that day, I was on the wrong side of it. I don’t think I’ve ever been so heated in my life. I mean, I was just mad. And, yanno, that didn’t really change much.

BEAT EM DOWN!!!

Fast forward to 2011, around the same time. I watched Alabama outclass Michigan State in every way in the Capital One Bowl. To itemize it would be disrespectful. I don’t even know to whom, but there was no need to get anal about it. It was what Emmitt Smith would call a debacling.

So on Twitter, during the game, I started tweeting with the hashtag #BEATEMDOWN. Next day on The Morning Jones, I told the Cotton Bowl story and let people hear the #BEATEMDOWN.

I’ll be damned it stuck. When UNC beat Duke in March, someone screamed out in a Raleigh bar, “fuck Joe in Raleigh, BEAT EM DOWN!” My man Francis in Maryland, last week, was in a waiting room in and screamed “BEAT EM DOWN!” during the second half of Duke-Arizona…and a guy in there with him joined in.

Weirdest thing about whatever this new life is that I live: the stuff me and my folk have been saying forever are actually catching on. It’s the coolest thing in the world, while simultaneously leaving me confused and perplexed.

Not too perplexed to start hustling, though.

So get those t-shirts. Lots of wonderful people have done a lot to make these happen, donating both time and services to help me get this going. To a man, they asked for nothing and, in some cases, emphatically refused to take anything from me. I can’t thank them enough. Sadly, the most I can do is respect their wishes not to be identified for their work.

Seriously.

So check out the shirts. As much as anything else, this allows me to see what the market for products is. I’d like to expand and put a couple of other ideas out there that I’ve been working on, and I hope the market is receptive to that prospect. But, for now?

#BEATEMDOWN!!!