Friday, January 27, 2006

My 30% Gay Socks

Gentle reader, you know by now that we only discuss topics of considerable metaphysical and sociopolitical weight on these pages. And you must know that when I use as patronizing a phrase as "gentle reader", we will be addressing the most girthsome of all sociometapholitical issues: fashion.

As of late, I have taken a liking to colorful socks. This may not be a challenging component of daily life for many of you, but I come from a firm Midwestern upbringing of white tube socks. Only when we were young and/or on the football team did they have colorful rings around the calves, and certainly men didn't flaunt their ankles about in anything so nancy as argyle.

Over my Christmas in the heartland, however, I had the chance to visit the great land of Kansas City. And there, amidst many a cute hipster girl and post-holiday sales, I found two festive pairs of J-Crew argyle socks. On sale. Twice marked down. They were five bucks each. One was bright green with blue argyle, the other, Lakers yellow with blue argyle. They match the jacket in my profile pic.

Now, even aesthetically, I've never been one for colored socks. Up until about three years ago, I associated the ability to wear black socks with a fundamental loss of innocence and the movie "Last of the Red-Hot Lovers." The loss-of-innocence thing I was sure of. Who wears black socks? Adults. Bankers. Tobacco lawyers. But when my then-lady bought me a armload of DKNY socks, I got over it and adopted them for casual use. Or maybe I lost my innocence, the vixen! Or I'm just a Red-Hot Lover. But we could've intuited that regardless of sock lifestyle.

Anyway, I splurged and got these sweetmeats of foot garmentry. And I found that I really like my feet covered in bright, happy colors. So I bought some more online. One, a fresh blue and brown striped number called "Mud Stream". In fact, I've spent more on socks this month than man-hours worth of personal hygiene.

This really invokes the question of "percent gay", and my roommates (there are occasionally five of them) have pegged me at 30 percent gay. This is not to say, as noted in some wayward footnote of Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, that 3 of every 10 sexual encounters is male, but rather, I have achieved roughly 1/3 Queer-Eye proficiency as a straight guy.

I guess really what I'm trying to say is that my boxers match my socks today. Draw your own conclusions. Just ... don't judge me. And don't tell anyone in the heartland.