House of Eratosthenes

If you’re a straight man, and you’re wearing looooooong shorts that extend past your knees, almost to your ankles, and the ass of those shorts dangles so low that you could zip up a cantaloupe in there — maybe you should skip this.

If anybody ever read this blog, which of course nobody does, they would recall a long-standing assertion that when Americans think about things, we believe we’re thinking as individuals but we really do it as part of a collective. And, futhermore, that we don’t do this as well after 1998 as we did before. Put another way, if you want to think logically and in a straigtforward way — regardless of what those around you are doing — if you want to be the rare maverick who really does think for himself, you have to work a lot harder at doing this after 1998 than you did before.

Toward the last part of the seventeenth century, Czar Peter the Great of Russia made a journey outside his backward-thinking home country, through the latter-Renaissance-era Western Europe. When he got back home, he laid down fines, special taxes, and penalties for wearing beards. He had a good reason for doing this. Beards, to Czar Peter as well as to the society as a whole, represented a culture he wanted to expurgate. During his journeys, he saw foreshadowings of the industrial revolution, things he would never have seen in a country as mired in agricultural livelihood as his own. He saw navies. He saw international trade agreements. He saw telescopes and prisms. He realized technology was approaching a quickening, back then, much as it is today, and he realized there was no reason the world’s next better-mousetrap couldn’t be invented by a Russian boy instead of a French or English boy. No reason, except, the sheepherding and corn-growing culture that had so thickly enveloped his realm.

Czar Peter understood that what a man wears, impacts what a man thinks. It shouldn’t be that way, but often it is.

And I found myself thinking about that when my date accompanied me to my very first visit to Hooter’s on Challenge Way, across the street from the Arden Fair Mall. We got a table right by the window, and after a few minutes I had to call something out to her, and she started noticing it too.

The forementioned loooooooong shorts. The butts on the shorts, dangling a good twelve inches or more beneath where the actual crotch was, so that the fabric dangled between the knees.

Oversized tee shirts. Oversized shirts, on big big men. Men, well over six feet tall, who nevertheless looked like they were borrowing hand-me-downs from their even-bigger brothers. The “shoulders” on the shirts, reaching down almost to the wearer’s elbows.

Fancy sneakers and loafers, beneath that three-or-four inches or so of bare flesh on the calves.

Gold chains around the really-really-thick necks.

Short hair. Kinda-short hair on top, with five-o’clock-shadow-short hair on the back of the head, between the ears.

Each.

And.

Every.

Single.

Fella.

Present. No exceptions, besides Yours Truly, and one other guy who I think was homeless.

After a few minutes, during which the uniformity of compliance became impossible to ignore, I had to comment that I didn’t seem to be blending in with the crowd very well. My tee shirt actually fit, around my chest, shoulders, and arms, and was tucked into my jeans, which in turn somewhat fit my butt cheeks. My success, and lack thereof, of managing the middle-age male tummy bulge was on display for all to see — as opposed to these guys all around me who were wearing, well, guys who were wearing tents.

Had I chosen to un-tuck my shirt, it would have ended somewhere around…my ass. My flesh-ass, and my pants-ass, which were at more-or-less the same height.

Hey, I understand the concept of fashion. I’ve heard of it. But there comes a point where, with the rules being sufficiently proscriptive, and the compliance being sufficiently universal, it starts to get kind of silly. Men aren’t built to be…penguins.

Having grown up in the seventies, I recall a widespread culture that was obsessed with fashion. With a certain excess, it got to be kind of sick. But this is worse, I think, because when you have been obsessed with fashion, traditionally you have been endeavoring to transmit a message of competence. You’re advertising that you can receive information about what’s “hip”; that you have a clothing budget; that you are a discriminating consumer of clothes; and that you know what looks good.

Here we are in the twenty-first century, and men (or the women who shop for them) are obsessed with a fashionable trend of wearing clothes that do not fit their bodies.

And frankly, it doesn’t look sophisticated. It looks about as chic as wearing a sweater with buttons & holes, and buttoning it so the wrong buttons go in the wrong holes. Kind of Rain-Man-ish. Like you need a little more assistance picking out your duds than whatever it is you’re getting.

That’s kind of ironic, because some women in-the-know have advised me this is about wearing what women are inclined to pick out. Apparently, the guys wearing these tents want to get the word out that they have women, and they’re “secure enough in their masculinity” to let those women make decisions, in a proxy capacity, about the clothes these guys wear. Question: Hypothetically, if a guy were to err in the opposite direction, relying on himself too much and failing to listen to the women around him when he needed to, wouldn’t one of the most reliable ways to pick this guy out, be that he’s the one wearing clothes that don’t fit?

If we are still thinking as a collective, and this is a symptom of how the collective is thinking, and communicates its ideas, perhaps it’s an indication that the collective is drunk and slurring its speech. I would recommend now, as the best time for the collective to go to bed & sleep it off.

Hi I�m Chris. Greatings from Germany Bottrop !!
- ChrisWoznitza | 09/21/2005 @ 12:37

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Dress For SuccessWednesday, September 21st, 2005

Dress For Success
Wednesday, September 21st, 2005