Category: Before

An acquaintance scribbles the time and address of a party onto the last page of my notebook. “Bring a bunch of people with you,” she tells me, “Most of my friends are guys, so I’m worried that the mix will be a little out of balance. If any of your friends are girls, bring them.” Underneath the address, she writes, “Bring alcohol/girls!”, which sounds like it was written in a different spirit than I think she intended.

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I finish reading a book and get up out of my chair. A little slip of paper with the words “Inspected by 42” printed on it falls out of my lap, and I can’t really figure out what it’s from.

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A cartoonist who I recognize is shuffling past. His attention is completely consumed by the new issue of the Stranger. He’s flipping furiously through the pages, trying to find his illustration.

I shift the heavy bag from one arm to the other on the way home from the grocery store. There’s a late night barbecue spilling out into the sidewalk up ahead. It’s a quiet scene as it turns out. The full-size grill is on the sidewalk right in front of the path. Someone is turning a cut of meat over with a spatula. There are three or four people relaxing on the steps leading up to the most graffitied house on the block. I nod hello to nobody as I trespass through the barbecue, where the chilled spring air is mixed with charcoal smoke.

When I’d seen them up ahead, I had prepared myself for something less sedate – maybe a broken beer bottle on the sidewalk or a jeering comment thrown in my direction. But last night was a perfect evening for a tentative first barbecue of the year. They were doing the most sensible thing – sitting outside in their dark side street, setting up the barbecue on the most convenient plot of level ground, pointing at the sky and pointing out the Big Dipper as “The Great Dipper“.

A man walks by with a pair of overly-groomed dogs of identical pedigrees. They stumble ahead with their leashes stretched out behind them. The dog on the right – the one closest to the street – falls behind to investigate a bush. Two girls, sitting several feet away, stop chattering to giggle. The other dog continues ahead and stops to look back at his owner, who is now looking back at the first dog trailing behind him. That dog turns around – either because he wants to face away from his owner or because he favors peeing to the left. The man is left out in the middle of the sidewalk with his arms stretched out in opposite directions, with each dog waiting a leash’s length away. The dog lowers his leg and turns around. But he gets confused on the way back. He runs up to his owner’s left – the wrong side – his companion dog’s side. The man quickly swaps one leash for the other, untangling the leashes and they move on.

• Attractive women would prefer receiving more speeding tickets.
• Protestants are more suceptible to altitude sickness than Catholics, and Catholics are more suceptible to motion sickness than Protestants.
• Chefs on the east coast will only serve asparagus that’s been quartered lengthwise.
• A pimple in between the eyebrows is a sign of wisdom.
• Left-handed people are childish.
• Politicians read the comics first.
• Cat owners drink chocolate milk.
• Middle children finish their dinner more quickly than their older and younger siblings.
• Insomniacs are good at locating misplaced items.
• Doctors read to their children more than lawyers do.
• Sitcom writers prefer Pepsi to Coke.
• Smokers enjoy the company of celebrities.
• Men with uneven sideburns are untrustworthy.

I’d just gotten a new box of Sudafed and opened it on the way out of the store. I walked around the corner outside while pressing one of the little plastic bubbles so that the pill would break through the foil card on the other side. I tried to choke the pill down without a cup of water; it didn’t quite make it. It stuck to the back of my tongue and started to dissolve. The bitter medicine spread through my mouth. So I stopped under a bus shelter and concentrated on gulping the pill down. I continued down the hill, fishing around in my backpack for mints. I found the mints as I was crossing into the street. I cracked open the tin and the wind immediately caught hold of the little fold of paper wrapped around the mints. The paper blew out into the street and the mints went out after it. I ended up with an empty tin in my right hand and one mint in my left, not sure if I’d gotten hold of the mint before the tin’s contents blew out or if I’d caught it in mid-air.

The empty chair across the table from me jolted up against my leg. An empty chair at the next table was pressed up against my empty chair. The woman seated at the other table must have shifted in her seat, pushing her feet against her empty chair. The kick was amplified through the one chair, the next chair, and into my leg. She didn’t seem aware of it.

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Birds swarm around the pier in a jittery swirl of chirps. They pass overhead, zip down among the barnacle-encrusted pylons, and come up again from the side. Two seperate flocks come up from opposite sides. The groups collide and merge; and the combined group speeds away in a new direction.

The days are getting longer. The sun hangs out past the water in the west sky, resisting the horizon.

There’s a crowd gathered at the end of a downtown hotel’s driveway. There’s a folding chair leaning against one of the sapling that’s planted in the sidewalk – it’s covered in signatures. One man is down on his knees, flipping through glossy autographed 8×10’s of professional wrestlers in a three-ring binder. This seems familiar. It’s the same hotel and maybe it’s the same group of fans. Looking for pro wrestlers in Seattle? It seems that the Hyatt is the place to start.

I wore khaki slacks, but before that I ironed khaki slacks. I’ll tell you about it sometime. How about now? It’s a good time for me, I’d be out somewhere, but I’ve just painted my front door and can’t close it until it’s dry. You’re stuck with me. So you might as well make yourself comfortable while I tell you about my pants and how I ironed them.

I don’t have an ironing board, so I did the work on a towel spread over the corner of my coffee table. When I finished ironing, I tried the pants on. They looked fine in the mirror, but the thought crossed my mind that they might need to have a crease ironed down the front of each pant leg. Do you do that with khakis, or only with more formal slacks? I couldn’t remember. I found some catalog photos online – pictures of smiling men enjoying their pants. Every pant leg had a neat and crisp crease down the front. So I set up the makeshift ironing board again, swapped the slacks for the jeans I’d been wearing earlier, and went back to work, carefully ironing a crease down the front of each leg.

When I finished I put the pants back on and checked out my handiwork in the mirror. The right leg was fine. The crease on the left leg veered off course from the front of my thigh, down toward the outside of the leg at the cuff. The left pants leg didn’t seem to be straight, it was trying to point out in front of me. The inseam twisted itself out about sixty degrees from the inside of my leg, so that at the cuff it was almost at the front of my leg. Someone had sold me a pair of irregular pants.

In the end, to compensate for the twisted leg, I ironed in a new crease that angled from the front of the pants leg down toward the inseam. The original seam didn’t iron out as completely as I’d hoped, so I ended up with a forked crease on my left leg. By the time I was out the door, the whole thing was a rumpled maze of wrinkles. They would impress nobody.

That’s the story of my pants.