Just Call Me Mister No Pants

I don’t know what the heck is wrong with me these days. It’s almost like I’ve forgotten how to dress myself. Upon recently taking a job where I can no longer where jeans and a t-shirt to work, I’m completely lost on how to look and dress like a grown up and/or buy clothes that fit me appropriately.

I’m specifically having issues in the pants department. I personally can’t stand “khakis”, I mean, even the term itself makes me cringe every time I say or write it, hence the quotes. Ick! Shivers of unrest just went up and down my spine. Yes, it’s that bad.

Some guys look perfectly fine in, um, the k word. I don’t. I don’t know what it is about me exactly but my body shape, even during the best of times, makes me look like a total idiot when I’m wearing them. They flare out in the pocket area, tend to hang off my knee caps as if I’m a child wearing his father’s oversized clothes, and so on. Even worse, they buckle in strange areas in a rather abnormal fashion, especially in the, well, crotch area. They’re simply the most uncomfortable and dorky looking thing, on me at least, that I can possibly wear, hence my distaste for them.

Dress pants, however, look reasonably decent on me but they present a whole new issue. Dress pants are like wearing no pants at all and feel closer to thin pajama bottoms, swinging around my ankles like some bizarre bedtime bell bottoms. I also tend to wear my fake vegan Doc Marten shoes mostly to work and they look a bit odd with dress pants. I would wear regular dress shoes but my feet are a whole different issue. Getting older sucks, let me tell you.

And so, to solve the pant issue, I found a Docker (even that word makes me cringe) brand pant that’s sort of a hybrid between khaki’s and jeans. This seemed like the perfect solution, no? Well, it kind of was…until merely days after buying one pair and then going to see Al Stewart at the Dakota Jazz Club. After getting him to sign an album cover that I intended to add to my wall collection, he forgot to firmly put the cap back on my marker…which I nonchalantly jammed into my pants pocket, ink side down. It was about 2 hours later that I noticed that the marker had bled through my pants. Ugh. Thanks, Al.

I bought another pair of these hybrid pants in a darker color, the same size, etc. I made a mental note not to carry any more markers in my pants with the lids off. I washed the pants, put them on, and guess what? Now they’re just a bit too short. Yes, that’s right, folks, I wear high waters to work each week.

Why not just buy new pants, you’re asking? Well, I’m at that infamous point right now where I’m heavier than I’d like to be and I keep hoping to change that any day. Of course, I’ve been saying this for the past year and a half, but I know that as soon as I spend more money on pants, they’ll no longer fit me and I’ll have to start all over yet again. This is just how my luck works. Therefore, I keep waiting to buy new pants for that special day when I can once again downsize.

In the meantime, my choices are pants with a big black marker stain, pants tailor made for walking through shallow puddles, dorky looking pants that stick out in various areas, making me look more endowed than I am, or pajama bottoms.

Ah, screw it. I’m just going to go pants-less from now. That’ll show ‘em.

Down from the Mountain

I just accomplished something significant in my life. Now, it’s admittedly not really the kind of thing that you would think. No, I didn’t get a novel published, a record contract, nor was I discovered by the New Yorker and asked to write editorial pieces or anything. It was none of those things and yet it was big: I finished reading a book.

Yes, I know, your scratching your head, aren’t you? Well, I am too a little. What book was it, you ask? It was Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain”, a book that I started, to the best of my memory at least, right around 2003. Quite frankly, I really don’t remember when I started it but it was at least seven years ago since I know I began reading it before I moved out of Phoenix.

Why did I even start reading this book, you ask (in case you’re wondering, yes, I CAN hear your thoughts from here!)? In truth, you’re correct in thinking it doesn’t seem like a book that I’d normally read. Well, it isn’t. I acquired it back probably ten years ago when I was joining and promptly cancelling memberships from book clubs and getting a small horde of books for next to nothing. Somehow this novel ended up in that pile and promptly sat on my shelf ever since. Considering that I can’t remember when I started this book, I most certainly can’t remember what it was that I read before it. Nonetheless, I’m relatively sure that I was kind of out of available books to read and so I settled upon this one which had become a sort of fixture on my shelf, kind of resembling an artifact more than something useful.

The book never really gripped me that much but yet wasn’t so terrible that I wanted to stop reading it. I know I read it quite a bit when I was living in my interim apartment when I first moved to Minnesota but for some reason after that I promptly stopped. It then became a sort of taboo item, something that just seemed weird to pick up and read after not doing so for so long. The rest is history. Years passed and until just recently, upon finding some books that I truly wanted to read, I felt that I first needed to finish my unfinished business and cleanse my book constipation period for good.

The culprit of my literary constipation

Some of you may know that I do a bit of writing here and there. I don’t, however, do a ton of reading and that always throws people for a loop. What kind of writer doesn’t read, right?! Well, I don’t and I can’t really explain it myself. I most certainly read more when I’m actually working on a writing project since I use books as a way of giving me formatting ideas and such. Since I haven’t really written anything creative in a long time, I guess reading just fell off of my radar. There are some other reasons that I won’t go in to here as well. I’m definitely not an avid reader, though, even when I’m “reading”. I know many people that crank through a book in a matter of a day or so and my usual turnaround is a couple of months. To date, I’ve read only one book from cover to cover in one sitting and I felt that was a major accomplishment in my life, even if it was only 250 pages or so.

And so, after nearly a decade, I just turned the last page of “Cold Mountain” yesterday. Ahhh…relief. For once, I feel like I truly accomplished something, even if it is totally irrelevant!