2003-10-20 - 5:17 p.m.
We have a burning question, and I'll bet somewhere in the broad vista of knowledge and understanding there is a satisfyingly sizzly, wet, flame-retardant answer. Please, if anyone "out there" can summarily seltzer my burning question, do so via the email link I have provided to my right (that's your left, silly -- I see you, I see you!):Burning question: how come so many elderly men look as if they saved throughout the 1960s until they had put together a tidy sum of money, and then sometime around 1973 took this sum with them to a large outlet that supplied stock for golf pro-shops, bought thirty-thousand identical brown and green shirts and pants, built a gigantic closet in which to house this colossus of earth tones, and then never bought another garment ever, ever again?
I regularly see old men wandering around in immaculate pre-disco-era clothes. They're absolutely spotless, perfectly seamed, with no holes or even loose threads anywhere -- and yet the sun set on these clothes' day of hip just shortly before it rose on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and lava-lamps.
Now and again you see even older folks doddering about in clothes just as unspoiled by the ravages of time but which were actually purchased before the birth of John F. Kennedy Jr. The idea of someone who remembers the last time abbreviated years began in zero wearing Eisenhower-era clothing that looks like it's seen just two hand-washings and eighteen minutes on a hanger is just beyond my powers of comprehension.
I am the sort of fellow who can find ways to destroy his clothing effortlessly within months of purchase. I can erode Goofy-ish hobo-holes in the soles of a pair of shoes in just fifty to seventy-five wearings. The notion that I might have flawless 2003 originals in my wardrobe five decades from now is impossible for me to imagine unless I picture myself backing a truck up to local boutiques and dropping obscene amounts of cash on hundreds of duplicate items which I then wrap in Mylar garment bags and store in a climate-controlled underground facility guarded round the clock.
I'm just now momentarily fond of imagining a clothing store (a boutique, perhaps even a haberdashery?) surrounded by some kind of rift in time; you'd walk into the shop and hear the soothing tones of inoffensive marimba music, a calm, bright, antiseptic rosy-cheeked world peopled by cats-eye-bespectacled salesfolk with relentlessly cheerful smiles. The racks would be teeming with clothes items stitched out of every synthetic known to the sartorial world. You'd buy a shirt or some billowy ankle-length skirt for $3.95, have it wrapped in peach tissue paper, tuck it under your arm, tip your hat, and step out through the entrance back into the noisome blue-hair tongue-piercing Marilyn-Manson reality-TV flash-mobbing rave-scene world of 2003.
Here's a movie idea for you: the above, with the outside world filmed in grainy black and white and the shop interior filmed in bold Technicolor, with a shopkeeper played by Dick Van Patten, and a group of hipster punks who break into the store one night and inside learn a valuable lesson about life that changes their hearts forever. Then everyone gets eaten by Godzilla. Eh? Not bad, huh?
Postscriptum: Ostensible Googlewhacks I Did Not Just Destroy By Writing the Above, Because Interestingly They Were Never Googlewhacks to Begin With: "Flame-Retardant Disco," "Sartorial Marimba," "Godzilla Haberdashery."
