I don’t know where I went wrong. My goal of being an outcast, or social misfit at the least, has evaporated faster than gasoline spilled on a hot driveway. I thought I had it nailed. Everything was perfect. I had exchanged the workaday world for the ivory dungeon of the wanna-be writer. Heck, I gave up being a bumto write. I traded my car for a bus pass. I even moved to Seattle, the Little Town That Thought It Could, where “Homeless Chic” passes for high style just so I wouldn’t have to buy any new clothes. I was set. I could plunge into my literary adventure unsullied by the societal pressures for conformity in which we daily bathe.

And then it happened. I woke up one morning staring down a completely new path for my life that wasn’t there the day before. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining in the slightest – OK, maybe just a little – but as with any major life changes I am going to have to make some minor alterations. You know, smoothly adapt to the new paradigm. Oh, screw it! What I really have to do to make this yet-to-be-revealed life-change work is to take a long-held and cherished part of myself, crumple it up into a wad, and toss it into the trash.

I am going to have to become fashionable.

I’ll give those of you who know me a minute to stop laughing, and collect yourselves. You might want to wipe off the keyboard where you just blew coffee out your nose. There. Better?

OK, “fashionable” may be a stretch, but at least stylish or, as the saying goes, put together. I’ll spare you the details of why this metamorphosis is needed, I do want to save some suspense for future blogs, but suffice it to say that achieving some kind of style is a necessary condition for me to proceed in the direction I now find myself pointed.

So you’re selling out?

And so it appears at first glance. But I know myself better than that and I can categorically state, pure in my doubtlessness, that no such thing is happening. In fact, six months from now this will have all blown over like a shower before the sun comes back out. Because, unbeknownst to the forces in play, any attempt by me to be fashionable, or stylish, or whatever is doomed, from the start, to be an utter, complete, and permanent failure. I just don’t have it in me.

For me “fashion” has always meant the expenditure of money on products specifically designed to increase my level of discomfort. Consider that, in my not-so-humble opinion of course, since Ötzi died on an Alpine snowfield some five thousand years ago wearing a very practical and comfortable outfit of handcrafted leather clothes; any changes in clothing design have been more-or-less unnecessary. To give you a glimpse as to how deeply felt that statement is let me tell you about something that happened to me recently. Last year I started a project to scan all my old photographs into digital form. One of the pictures I scanned in was my school photo from third grade. When my cherubic image appeared on the screen I was instantly taken aback. Was I surprised at how cute I used to be, or how I used to have freckles, or how big my ears were? No. My immediate response to seeing this image from my distant past was: “Gee, I think I still have that shirt.”

To this day, if I think an article of clothing doesn’t have the life expectancy of an unopened Twinkie, I put it back on the shelf. For me to fork over my hard-won dollar the things I wear have to be practical, functional, and last forever. With that kind of calendric esthetic I’m betting that there’s no room at all for me to develop even a hint of “fashion”. Let alone a sense.

Another gripe I have is that “fashion” is never about what I think would look good on me but what somebody else thinks looks good enough on a mannequin to allow them to keep making payments on their car. The only way they can do this is to keep changing what the mannequins wear and, by doing so, hopefully induce me to buy the new fashion and consign the old to someone less fashionable than myself. As if. This constant testing of the fashion waters requires shopping, an activity I typically respond to like a slug sprinkled with salt. No, when I need new clothes I don’t go shopping, I go buying. I walk into the store, select my size and needed color off the shelf, and walk out – usually stopping to pay. There are never any worries about trying things on, or does it go with my eyes, or stripes vs. plaid conundrums. It’s always the same size and it’s always khaki, white, or blue.

This is why the only thing that’s changed about my wardrobe since the third grade has been the size.

Something else that gets me about fashion is that it doesn’t do what it purports to do, which is to make you look better. Out in the world we find that there are a few really good-looking people, a few really bad-looking people, and the rest of us in the middle somewhere. Now we could take that really good-looking guy and dress him like Ötzi and he’d still be a really good-looking guy. Similarly, we could dress our hypothetical ugly guy in Armani but he’d still look like somebody dropped a pallet of nickels on him. But, for some reason, dress Mr. Handsome in Armani and, collectively, we have the reaction that designers and retailers the world over crave. We think “Oh, nice suit,” then rush out to buy one of our own. We think that because he looks so good in it that we will as well. Fat chance.

Change the point-of-view around and a first principle of human communication becomes evident. Imagine you are that good-looking guy dressed to the nines, when somebody comes up to you and says “nice suit” you know what they’re really saying is “you’d look good if you were dressed like Ötzi”. On the other hand, if you are the ugly guy you know somebody telling you “nice suit” means “nice try”. For the rest of us “nice suit”, in fact, means “nice suit.” We have no impact on our clothing one way or the other; nor it on us. For us, dressing fashionably just doesn’t help unless your clothes like to be complimented.

For me the nail in the coffin, fashion-wise, is a little known secret that the designers and retailers conveniently fail to mention in the ads. The secret is that style is not something that you put on, but something that you put out, like a pheromone. If you are stylish you ooze style. You live, breathe, and feed on it. And everybody else can tell. This is the way that “fashion” advances. Some stylish somebody wears something that they like and everybody else wants to be like that stylish person. Poof! A fashion is born. Then the fashionable one sees that now he or she looks like they shop at Wal-Mart and they change their look in response. The crowd follows and the cycle begins yet again.

I am not such a person. I don’t ooze style. I seep schlub. Put me in something stylish and I look about as uncomfortable as a bartender at an A.A. meeting. Something in me repels fashion. Dress me in Armani and it would look like the suit is trying to crawl off and find its way back to Saks. I’m the guy who turns haute couture into goat couture.

So, given my fashion failings, what am I doing taking off down this path that absolutely requires me to be stylish? First off – and I don’t want to spoil the surprises to come – this next adventure is going to be so amazing that when I tell you about it, much as I had to do with Carl and Lupe, I will have to fictionalize it nearly completely. Just to make it believable. Second, the “fashion” part of it is really pretty small potatoes. It’s a key part, though not an integral part, of my new life so adapting a fashionable mien will be much more fun than getting all idealistic and sticking to my sartorial-sinkhole style-guns. I mean, come on, if I don’t care enough to make a special effort todress fashionably then, given the benefits, why would I make a special effort not to? And lastly, I am comforted by the knowledge that fashion is all about change. The new clothes I get will soon ebb out of fashion and the old clothes I keep, well-hidden, will flow back in. My choice to attempt to be the new Beau Brummel, or Geste, or Bridges – whoever it was – is not even a blip on life’s radar. Because, regardless of what fashions I buy, how I look in them, or what other people think, underneath the cloth it will still just be me