Do you like these shorts?
I just bought them yesterday. I am in London. It's crazy hot here this summer, and I needed to buy some shorts. So I went to Primark, the white trashiest and, consequently, hippest store in London. And these were the shorts I bought.
I like them. I like the length, for one thing. I like the fact that I'm not always worried about my g's poking out the bottom. When I turned thirty I swore I would no longer wear shorts since I have poky chicken legs and anyway nobody likes dads in shorts. But here we are, eleven years after that fateful pronouncement, and I've slowly started wearing short again. It didn't happen overnight, though, this recommitment to shorts. It happened slowly, bit by bit, until it was a formidable "thing." Not unlike, say, the perpetuation of a lie, or the Hindenburg disaster.
I also like the color of these shorts. But therein lies the problem. I can wear these shorts with comfort and ease on the streets of London. Gentlemen wear such colored shorts here. Raspberry trousers? Wha? No big deal. But when I'm back home, when I'm wearing them to, say, Lowe's in Orem on a Saturday morning, it's a different story. Brave people might ask me about these magenta wonders (are they knickers, maybe?) but most people will just look at them and then quickly look away. We cannot face what we do not understand, and that includes all things aubergine.
So it's a conundrum. I come over here and I want to buy and wear colorful things of all lengths and shapes. Anyway, that's what's in the store. But then I have to bring these things home, and I spend the next year explaining them to friends and family. Last summer I brought home some salmon pants, which my wife loved and endorsed, by the way, but I eventually stopped wearing them because that's all anybody wanted to talk about (why not care about what's happening on my inside? My life is super hard.)
I know that, as an American man, I'm not supposed to care about my clothes or have any opinion about them. I've been known to tell people, in the past, that my wife dresses me. But she doesn't, and never has. It's a shameful cop out. Hey everybody: I picked out these eggplant shorts! I like them! I know they are capri length! I still like them! I'm going to wear the crap out of them. And then I'll probably take them back to Primark they day before we fly home. They were only 3 pounds.
BTW: I invite you to follow my daily London blog here. It's informative and sexy!
