Clothes to the Edge

I'm a slob.

No, I'm not one of those beer-commercial bozos who champions his maleness by going to the grocery store in his pajama bottoms, scratching rude parts of his body and unleashing wave after wave of lunch meat belches so foul they part the hair of the person ahead of him. Instead, I'm the guy who slowly devolved into waking up amongst the McDonald's wrappers, ATM receipts and orphaned pen caps asking, "Where did all this crap come from?" Hey, I'm not proud of it. I survive amongst it, I manage around it, but I'm surely not proud of it. I am anything but metrosexual. The closest I come to being Metro is the fact I've seen Fritz Lang's classic movie, Metropolis, a half dozen times. Toss in the fact I've taken public transportation to and from New York City and enjoy the occasional bagel with my coffee and you have the sum total of anything in my life even remotely resembling "Metro."

Why am I telling you this? For the obvious fact that I went clothes shopping today. Wait, let me amend that. I bought a shirt and a pair of khakis. I don't "shop" - I buy. I see something I like and buy it. No trying it on, no waiting around for sales, no driving around to different stores to compare prices. Nope. It's get in, get out and go the hell home.

"Will you just get on with the damned story?!?!?!?!?!"

Yeah, ok. So, there I was in the store, and I'm sizing up some polos when an odd thing happened. I noticed that the only shirts I was even considering were dark. I asked myself why that was. Then it hit me. I'm not buying shirts for how they look; I'm buying shirts based solely on their ability to cover up food stains.

A little history here:

I am the world's messiest consumer of food. I'm a full body-contact eater. If you can cook it, I can wear it. I am the unofficial record holder for the greatest variety of foods worn in a lifetime. Now here's the part where you chime in and say, "Well, I always seem to be wearing white when I have pasta and I never fail to get some little spots of sauce on me." Amateur. I wore a personal pan pizza WITH crazy bread down the front of my shirt. I got french toast in my hair. And once, I ended up with the entire Country Buffet salad bar in my front pocket - even in the useless little mini-pocket. One day at work, a co-worker came up to me and said, "Hey, Chief, you've got some mustard on your shirt." I looked all over and couldn't see anything. "No, it's right there." He pointed to my shoulder. I looked over and there it was. How the hell did I get mustard on my shoulder? ON MY SHOULDER! Like Sherlock Holmes, I reconstructed my lunch. I had a ham and cheese sandwich on a kaiser roll. Apparently, when I bit into the sandwich with the force of a 100-megaton bomb, a fissure in the top part of the roll opened up just enough to allow a stream of mustard to gracefully arc its way into the air and crash land onto my shoulder. I have ruined more shirts, trousers, suits, ties - you name it - than any 10 people you could name. You're probably asking, "What are you, a complete idiot?" No, I'm still paying on the installment plan.

Anyway, back to the clothing store. Look, I know I'm nowhere near the shape I was in the salad days of my life, but the clothes racks were so close together I felt like I was stuck in the gears of some evil puppet master's voodoo clock while trying to navigate my way through the store. I'm not joking. Had it not been for the sales staff, I'm sure I would have been taken down in the 20% Off aisle and by daybreak my bones would be whitening beneath the Dockers display.

All in all, though, I seem to have escaped relatively unscathed. No more buying clothes for their style. For me, it's function over form, and that function is to not be walking through the hallways at work with the soaked-in remains of an errant spoonful of chili in the shape of Greenland visible on my chest.

I must say, I like the new shirt. I just put it on and it fits, so I'm happy and all is right with the world.

Hey, gotta run. The pizza's here.