Therefore, By Implication-
Posted by Ace on October 6th, 2009 filed in letters from Ace, truismsTo that great list of Mildly Annoying Truisms, add this: if anyone stops to compliment me on any aspect of my dress, it is invariably in reference to an item of clothing that was given to me unbidden by someone else. If they say “nice shoes”, for instance, they are referring to the pair my ex-girlfriend gave me, the ones she got from her friend’s husband, for whom they were one size too big. If they say “nice tie”, it’s one of the hundreds of ties that used to belong to my father, one that found its way into my closet only because my father is dead and my brother has more ties than he can possibly ever use. If they say “cool t-shirt”- and I have a freakin’ lot of T-shirts, including a Hicks County Poultry Fanciers t-shirt, and the Amber Horizons 47 t-shirt I designed myself- they are commenting on the daruma mask t-shirt that my friend Uriel and his wife brought me as a surprise present from Japan. Even the network swag my friends drool over finds its way into my possession more or less at random.
I am hoping to mitigate this trend for the space of a day with the new suit I purchased last Saturday. (I have little patience for listening to members of either sex bitch about how the other has it easier, but I will ungrudgingly concede that when it comes to fashion, men get a walk-  we can wear pretty much the same damn suit to just about any formal occasion, and so long as we keep it clean and replace it once every few years, no one notices or cares.) Few people who might have the inclination to compliment me on it will actually see it, of course: the Empress, with whom I am going out to dinner, and my co-workers, who are more likely to notice the sudden, miraculous transformation to formal dress than anything about the suit in particular.
But I’ll know.
October 7th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
I actually liked the green army colored vest and fedora (or whatever sort of hat it was) years. That had to be all you, right?
You could do a whole blog post on lost classic t-shirts. I had a number that seem to have sublimated (gone from a solid directly to a gas, like moth balls) in my closet or drawers. A favorite lost shirt of mine was acquired at Lark Fest in Albany about 1995. A two panel sendup of Peanuts, it had Snoopy in the first panel, with his dog food dish in his mouth, kicking the backdoor of Charlie Brown’s house (shown as “WAM! WAM! WAM!” as he often did in the comic strip). In the second panel, Charlie Brown comes out and screams, in huge Schultzesque letters, such to blow Snoopy’s ears backwards in shock, “STOP KICKING THE FUCKING DOOR!”
I haven’t seen that beloved shirt in years.
October 7th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
No, (LOL) the green army vest (actually a green army jacket with the sleeves ripped off) was given to me by Orion and Hampstead. It had been Orion’s when he was stationed in Belgium; he’d given it to Hampstead long before I met them, and Hampstead pulled it out on a night all three of us were together to illustrate to me that he and Orion had both once been my size. (They were somewhere in the neighborhood of 275-300 lbs. at the time!) They had me try it on for confirmation, and since it fit, and neither of them was ever going to wear it again, they gave it to me.
The hat, though, I bought myself, yes, at a kiosk in Willowview Mall.
I still have both the vest and the hat. They came up in an earlier post, not too long ago.
The Peanuts t-shirt sounds very funny, although for some reason I’ve always had an aversion to items of clothing with profanity on them. (Though not to swearing itself, certainly. I think perhaps the distinction is that I can stop swearing if I choose, whereas a t-shirt with profanity on it can’t, if you know what mean.) Few of them have ever sublimated on me, but I did have a t-shirt that belonged to my Dad literally disintegrate in the wash, despite having never been worn, on account of its being so old.
I preserved many of my oldest t-shirts by cleverly having Weaver and her mother Noel make them into quilts for me. :)
And Church still has my Eldritch Seaport t-shirt! Hey, give that back!!
October 8th, 2009 at 8:35 am
Crap! Now I’ve realized that I am missing a t-shirt. And not only is it one that I designed myself, and one of my favorites, it’s one I can’t replace– it was silkscreened in a limited run by a third party to be used as a giveaway at a con. Mega-bummer. :(
At least I picked up some new ones on those field trips with Jack.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:03 am
I am also strangely stoked by the prospect of not having to slouch through the shadow of the Metropolitan Institute of Fashion, which I pass every day on the way to work. :)
May 8th, 2010 at 9:28 am
Zora the production manager, who rarely engages me regarding anything except the job, complimented me yesterday on an vampire-anime-themed button-down shirt I was wearing over my t-shirt. Which was given to me by… you guessed it… Dragonia. Of course.
Although in this case, I don’t so much mind, because it is a really cool shirt, and it’s awesome she got it for me.