Always Drunk

For my inaugural post, I'm going to tell a funny story. This has the advantage of:

1. Not being political (in a later post I'll explain why you've come to the wrong place if you're looking for political discourse here).
2. Not requiring research on my part to get it posted.
3. Providing a cheap laugh to readers at my expense, on the theory that a cheap laugh at my expense is better than than a reaction of (flattens hand and makes see-saw motion) "Eh."

Yesterday my family and I went shopping. Beloved Spouse needed new sneakers, Precocious Daughter needed additional back-to-school clothes, having outgrown several pairs of pants since I bought them shortly beforre school started. I was along to swipe the debit card through the machine, as usual.

So BelSpouse is trying on sneakers, and am I showing my age and general abstraction from the zeitgeist by calling them sneakers? What are they now - trainers, athletic shoes, tennies? Anyway, those rubber-soled, excessively marketed items of footwear that he manages to wear out with greater frequency than many minor league-level professional athletes (I surmise).

While he's trying on approximately 600 nearly identical pairs of shoes, I wander over to the women's clothing section. And I find A BARGAIN. A clearance rack of jeans! A pair of capri-length Levi's for ten dollars! And a pair of dark-wash Lee jeans, also for ten dollars! And both in my size (let's not dwell on which size that is, except to say that I do not share the dilemma of the New York Times columnist who sniffed that she had a hard time finding size 2's at the new Manhattan JCPenney).

"Mommy bought two new pairs of jeans" is not a sentence I expect to write very often on this blog, along with "Mommy stepped back from her passionate embrace with Patrick Dempsey to explain that, no matter how desperately he declared his love, she couldn't leave her family to be with him." So I was pretty darn happy as I walked out to the car, clutching my unexpected denim windfall. I opened the passenger-side door, swung into the front seat...and heard the unmistakable sibilant purr of fabric rending. I looked down and saw most of my left thigh flowing like vanilla pudding through a new and expansive hole in the leg of the pants I was wearing. It's not the metaphor I would have preferred to write, but I've got to be honest - it looked like a leak had sprung in a big vat of Jell-O pudding. I'm working on it.

I will say in defense of my thighs that I was wearing my oldest and most comfortable pair of jeans. The denim had acquired a weight and texture not unlike a sheet of fine vellum writing paper. (Look it up, youngsters - people used to write on paper, and would do their important writing on quality paper, not the stray piece that got bent going through the printer.) When I lightly tugged at the edge of the tear, it quickly and easily doubled in size. In short, I'd like to stress that my thighs and I did not kill these jeans, although I'm not ruling out the possibility that they committed suicide.

Over the howls of laughter of BelSpouse and PDaughter, I fretted to myself. We still had other stops to make on this shopping trip. The jeans were no longer wearable. They weren't simply fashion-forward in their tattered state: When the beautiful people pay $100 or more for ripped jeans, this is not where they're artfully torn.

Then I realized: I, in defiance of all the laws of consumerism and family dynamics, had just walked out of a store with not one, but two new pairs of jeans. On the very day, at the very hour, that my valiant Levi's had crossed over to denim Valhalla, I had unwittingly obtained their replacement. Was it karma? Was it fate? Was it a total coincidence that I could fashion into a significant event for the sake of an inaugural blog entry? Yes on all counts, and I dare you to prove otherwise.

So there you have it. Next up: The origin of the blog name, the explanation behind my distate for political bloggery, and random facts designed to embarrass my loved ones. Comments are appreciated!