Thanks Siggy for this donation.  Topic: a personal story, in my usual way.

MY PANTS

Faded or torn-up blue jeans occasionally rear their ugly head in fashion, and I have worn them far more times in the past than they have been fashionable.  When the holes were big enough and the weather cold enough, I’d wear those off-white thermal underwear underneath ’em.  You know, long johns.  Don’t google those unless you wanna see lots of manly packages and possibly some erections as well; they’ve become a fetish thing.  But yeah, this was the uniform for the lower half of my bod, at one point in time.

But they ain’t cool in my book if they didn’t get faded through actual wear.  Start with some medium blue jeans, wear them til they fall to pieces, shaggy strings all over like a Komondor.  And when should you wear scrubbly clothes?  When doing scrubbly activities.  During the latter part of my time in college I was living with my dad while he tried to make a living as a painter.  When he was desperate and needed some unpaid labor to squeak through a job he’d under-bid, he had me.  That foolish mess paid our rent, my freelance arting did not.

There’s a block of businesses in Seattle that my dad got hired to paint. Some of the lessees chose the color for their little slice of the building, but the rest of the behemoth was up to the property owner.  At first she picked out a color on the rose side of beige, but when the building was almost completed, she said hey, wait, that’s titty pink.  What was I thinking?  So she had my dad start over again with something in the ballpark of gingerbread house.

So I’m helping my dad paint a big-ass building when it isn’t raining.  For slave labor it wasn’t bad, or maybe I got rose glasses on.  My dad was much stronger than I am at the time, not to mention having the relevant job skills, so he did most of the hard stuff and I just moved hoses and tarps around, did a little brushwork.  The weather was mild and you could hear kids rolling skateboards around all day.  A local pizza place made good, passably cheap stuff at that time.

But where the jeans were the most blown out, at the knees, I got some brown paint there.  You see brown specks or splashes on a garment outside of a context where there is definitely paint happening, the most generous interpretation is that they are mud stains.  You can figure what some people thought.

I don’t know what I was smoking at the time, but I gave the perceptions of others zero thought, and wore my stained jean/long john combo everywhere I went.  One time up on Capitol Hill this rough-hewn unhoused dude looked at me like I was the worst kind of poser.  I think he audibly huffed, might have cursed?  I didn’t wear them for long after that.  Even without specifically phrased feedback, I got the memo.

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