2003-09-18 - 5:26 p.m.
You might wake with a start one morning, breathless and sweating, and confront the terrible sublime void of your existence, and gazing long upon your indefensible world, nagged from below the besieged surface by recondite doubts, you might Take Up Eating Better and Exercising.Or you might do as I seem to have done. You might simply abandon convenience food as no longer interesting to you, without any specific aim of improving your diet. You might find yourself eating from the four food groups without actually setting out to do so. And you might come to realize this in the strangest way: by discovering that you are experiencing a mild and consistent healthy weight loss. You might not look any different, but you may notice your rings and watch not fitting as tightly as they used to, and you might find yourself wearing your belt at the smallest loop and noticing that your pants still sag a little almost like the suburban kids' pants do when they decide they are not sufficiently Street and they take to that terribly attractive fashion trend that places back pockets where they most certainly always belonged: on the backs of knees.
That is so very lovely a look, is it not? I had thought it vanished some time ago, left to join brocade dickies and corsets and zippered faux-leather Michael Jackson wear in the Place Where Moribund Fashions Go to Die. And then I saw one of our employees at work stumbling around in his low-slung pants, wallet-chain slapping away at the back of his thigh as he struggled to maintain his balance while the Burden of Being Very West-Side pressed down upon him. Two standup comics immediately appeared in my mind to present their observations: Denis Leary with his "pull up your pants" rant and George Carlin with his bit about the impossibility of white folks wearing ball-caps backwards looking anywhere near as cool as black folks.
I would certainly not nominate myself as the high priest of cool, that's for sure. I am not entertaining any delusions about myself as some bleeding-edge hipster guru -- I have spent the last 27 years in a state of uncool-that-is-okay-because-it-ignores-cool. I am not dumped-his-internet-girlfriend-to-find-more-time-for-Magic-the-Gathering uncool. I am simply not-necessarily-cool uncool. But I'm easily cool enough to perceive the desperate lack of cool in tarpaulin-esque size 55 pantaloons on a skinny suburban white kid.
(Why, it now occurs to me to ask, are Phrases That Are Capitalized suddenly used by me here to reflect Institutions With Dignity Perceived as False? Is this tied to some secret yearning to be German, expressed in the freedom to capitalize all Nouns? Or is it a new emergence of the same impulse that made the whole of academia spend the 80s putting "scare-quotes" around all the "terms" they "used" and placing portions of words in (paren)theses to toy with etymo(logical) (co)incidence and in so doing look (sophist)icated?)
(And now, right on cue, a chorus of Mirabile Visu readers' brains all twigging to the same observation, that with his parenthetical remarks above he leaps out of the not-necessarily-cool-uncool frying pan and into the full-on-dorkdom fire.)
