Last Tuesday night, I bought a pair of pants that were not khaki, so if you felt the earth tremble at about six pm central time, that’s why.
I have been a khaki-pants-wearing guy for about fifteen years. If I wasn’t wearing dress pants, I wore khakis. Haven’t owned a pair of jeans for so long, I can’t remember the last time I wore them. After I’d made up my mind that I’d wear khakis forever, I stopped buying them. I think I bought my last pair of jeans in the mid-80s.
But last Tuesday after work, I broke down and went to Kohl’s to buy clothes because all the pants I owned were so old they were fraying at the cuffs and wearing thin in the butt. Added to that, I needed some short-sleeved shirts to wear on the hot summer afternoons we’ve been experiencing lately, but I didn’t have any that would make me look presentable in any setting except maybe if I was stirring a pot of beans in a hobo camp.
For once, shopping took less than an hour and I found everything I wanted, even pants, which are almost impossible for a guy like me to buy off the shelf. If I were six inches shorter and had a thirty-two inch waist, or six inches taller and had a beer gut that stuck out like the belly of a woman who was no more than five minutes away from giving birth, I could easily find pants. Most of the pants I see on the shelf are for the beer gut crowd, which makes a certain amount of sense: I live in Wisconsin, land of men who proudly bear the most well-developed beer guts in the nation. Either Kohl’s routinely chooses not to stock pants that fit me, or there are a lot of people out there built like me who snatch them off the shelf the moment they’re available, but I think the former is more likely than the latter, because, again, beer gut guys.
But I found two pairs of pants that were close enough to my size to say, “eh, fuck it,” and toss them into my shopping cart. They weren’t khakis, though, which was the first thing My Darling B noticed when I brought them home. “OH MY DOG!” she said, or something like that. Can’t wait to see how she reacts when I bring home a pair of jeans next time I go shopping.
This Is Drivel 