Kill me in my favorite clothes
The general populace seems to have taken issue with my summertime couture, which typically includes a pair of cut-off shorts at any given moment and a t-shirt turned inside out. Somewhere these people have aligned, setting up camp on some slow evening, before dispersing back out into the world again, where they are breaking down my will to smite consumerism in my own small ways, like looking like crap, and always refusing wear shirts which contain slogans or overt references to products and people (unless you could devise a shirt with, like, a friend’s name on it or something, with individual talent sets and statistics revealed on the back, like a baseball card, which I would endorse fully and which I suggest someone makes me, immediately). The snide commentary has manifested in everything from smug commentary to laughing out loud as I walk down the street. But that’s just the price you have to pay for avoiding the cash-transaction, which is my own microcosmic way of collapsing the economy entirely and sending things into such a wretched tailspin that we have to start running with wolves and seeking out caves to live in.

Somewhere between my righteous indignance for looking like shit and getting made fun of, I have decided to get on board and hook up some new clothes for the greater good. As some small compromise I went to the local Goodwill store this weekend. Those clothes, at least, wouldn’t be officially new, and so at least in my mind I wouldn’t actually be contributing to the proliferation of more shopping malls, and thus made everything ok-seeming. I walked around the store for a while, checking in on the ornate nic-nacs, before settling on two shirts. Satisfied with these items, I qued up in line behind three teen-aged girls, who were apparently entertaining their own acts of youthful transgression, ill-conceived as it was, weird bandannas and all. As I waited, a fraternity bro and his girlfriend also got in line, behind me. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” said bro said to his girlfriend. “I’m not some kind of fag, you know.” The university is down the road and these types tend to proliferate. That’s just the kind of thing you have to contend with, living around a place like Albany, New York, where the general population seems to consist almost entirely of students during the school year, sprawling and disconcerting to the senses. It seems superfluous and unnecessary to assign any individual character traits to these people, since they were all seemingly created in decanters, with very specific features assigned, so as to further cultural homogeneity and horribleness. I don’t have any say in this, really. It’s akin to living in a place with bad air quality. You have to know where to stay away from.

As I waited, and said line-waiter’s commentary became more and more outrageous, curiosity got the best of me, and I just had to take a look back at the person in question. As I did, his own eye caught my own, which must have caused such a jolt to his solar plexus that it caused his lip to curl in a Billy Idol-variety snarl—or what might alternately be described as the snarl of a wolf, teeth-barring and clearly out of its natural habitat. I still can’t tell if this was the most hilarious thing I have ever seen in my life, or if it was amazing because at any moment he was about to transcend himself and all of the limitations imposed on him, shredding his clothes in Teen Wolf fashion, before making an exit from the store. But beyond all of that, he probably just didn't dig my outfit.

The cashier eventually rang up my purchase, placed my shirts in a bag, and handed them to me. I then strode out into the world again on two legs. It was concrete and menacing.