Pull Up Your Pants! or Why I Chose Not to Become a Proctologist

Nobody wants to become a curmudgeon: "Mah! Kids today...with their clothes and their hair..." We are, however, here in America, in a place that makes it difficult.

I don't know how it is in other countries, but, here, there is a trend related to the wearing of pants. Young men (and, sometimes, young women, I'm told) wear their pants around the hips or lower, exposing some or all of their underwear. It used to be only a select group of the younger set, but, lately, it seems more common to see a young man with his pants slung either lowishly or even below his buttocks, his underwear completely exposed.

Where'd this come from?

When I was a kid, there were a lot of musical, playground sing-songy teasings of: "Hee, hee -- I can see your underwear." One lived in fear if one sat in rows in front of others. One pulled down the back of one's shirt compulsively. I don't know. Maybe, one day, someone said: "I'm not gonna take any more," and yanked those babies down in the lunchroom to do a defiant table-top dance among the plastic trays. If so, kudos to the brave fourth grader -- the Thomas Paine of pants.

Nah -- alas, it ain't so. It did begin in prisons --  not, according to Snopes, as an invitation for casual sex with other inmates, but as a result of ill-fitting prison garb and the lack of belts therein. (The lack of belts, of course, is a result of the ban on interior decorating in cells. Wardens hate when prisoners hang things from the ceilings and bars, especially themselves. I can see why. It's really quite gauche.)

"Gear" vs. "Clothes"

Today, I looked down the street and was reminded of a pet-peeve of mine.

There is an old gentleman who lives a few houses down from ours. He happens to be Scottish, if I catch his accent and his last name's implications right. He's a nice fellow. Sort of austere. He moves slowly but surely, sometimes with a cane and sometimes without.

It was about ninety degrees Fahrenheit, today. What struck me was what he was wearing: a white, button shirt with suspenders, a classic flat cap and black socks with black, leather dress shoes. His shorts looked like they had once been dress pants, but cut-off and hemmed.

I like that.

To me there is something annoying about the fact that we have special clothes for everything today: bike-riding clothes; yoga clothes; gardening clothes; dancing clothes, etc. I know they have practical benefits, but I can't help feeling that this painstaking specialization means that we are so far from the basics of daily survival that it puts us into a bit of an existential limbo.