The Stories…

The Stories…

I’ll probably never write. I mean my head is full of them—and good ones, too. But I don’t think they’ll make it to daylight anytime soon.

Ennui by Walter Richard Sickert circa 1914

Why not? Ennui came to mind but that’s not it. Not at all. Ennui to me denotes waiting for something—a protracted, slow moving state of simmer—with a barely fueled yearn for something, even if you don’t quite know what that something should be or is going to be upon arrival. And I’m so settled on this rather comprehensive definition of ennui that even if it’s miles off the mark, my definition stands.

Writer’s block would indicate that I’m a writer so that one’s out too. Boredom? Not so much. Inability to concentrate, to hold a thought long enough for it to morph into a cogent flurry of words? Now we are getting somewhere. Inertia.

My blessings outweigh my challenges and my decades old strategy of taking the proverbial plusses and minuses inventory to reground me remains a decent technique. But one thing I’ve learned in the last year and a half is that pain and suffering are unique and the degree to which anyone suffers should never be discounted, regardless of how their pluses and minuses exercise nets out. I’ll never again trivialize anyone’s pain just because I view it as comparatively trifling.

Bottom line is that I think I’m still grieving. And I’m trying hard to step into it, to participate in its coursing through, yet not wallow. But it’s cold here and flannel sheets and lush robes and shearling lined bedroom slippers are conducive to a bit of wallowing. Shut up.

So if I could write I’d finally do the promised story on this shirt from the nice people at Sebastian Ward. 

I don’t shill so you know that if I agree to write about a product, it’s gonna be unvarnished. And  I’ve already got the title. Quirky Shirts. Because they are. And of course that suits the hell out of my fuzzy-diced, “give me one of everything that you can possibly add to a garment, please” proclivities. 

I asked for a third sleeve with holes for three cufflinks and the narrow thinking, unimaginative bastards at Sebastian Ward shut me down. Thank you.

And then there’s the story that if I did write it, I’d title it Miracle Mark. About my might as well be blood brother Mark Rykken and the fact that back when I was solvent, I had Puerto make an updated version of my favorite W. Bills brown houndstooth jacket.

Rykken and I are both getting a wee bit long in the tooth. I honestly could afford to gain eight to ten pounds; Rykken?

I had a bulletproof, go-to version of this baby that my sartorial daddy, Alan Flusser in concert with Rykken, made for me a zillion years ago. You can read all about that one here. And we did that one faithful to the old Brooks Brothers model…open patch breast, patch and flap side pockets, welt seams and my ADG 3/2 tweak. Just fuzzy enough, right? But times change, and gorge, button stance nuances, and other impertanalia redefine themselves. Redefinitions be damned because W.Bill was out of this houndstooth for several years. You couldn’t make, or remake one if you wanted to.

 But then a bolt miraculously emerged. So I transferred the old jacket to a faithful buyer who takes almost any and everything ADG bespoke off of my hands for win-win prices and put a down payment on the new one. And it took me a over year to finally get it finished. Both payment and fitting.

I've always had a thing for brown/tan houndstooth. Here I am in London twenty years ago with my other daddy R.E.B. Read more about him here. I'd just discovered the vintage clothing shop, Bertie Wooster in the Fulham Road earlier that day and pounced on the 3/2 peak number that I'm sporting for the photo opp.

Then a few years later, here's R.E.B. and me again. This time its October in Ponte Vedra and I'm to be married the next day. This houndstoothian version was wool and silk. I wore it to death. Alas.

Rykken didn't seem too chafed by my dilatory-essence. He offered that the jacket spawned a few additional sales when others gandered it. And after W.Bill ran out of the wool bolt, Rykken simply offered a one-hundred percent cashmere version to his more moneyed masses. 

And there’s the story that I never did on my friend Nick Hilton I titled Nick of Time. And it was going to be a good one too. About his kindness and renaissance man-ifestations and how his wife is as lovely as she is nice, too. Nick made a couple of jackets for me a zillion eons ago and I have things to say about them but also about his dad, Norman. And the mantle Nick bears and the Ralph connection and all of the other stuff that’s been rehashed along these lines. But not by me.

How could I not ideate on a story about my good friend Hetom at Sky Shoes? The Sky’s The Limit is the working title of that one. Hetom is a trained shoemaker who, given the right circumstances, could turn out bespoke shoes right here in D.C. He won’t do that for you but he is the go to oasis of shodding knowledge inside the Beltway and I don’t know why others don’t seek his counsel as often as I do. Crocket and Jones and Alden and other unique tasty goods are there for the having.

So the blue suede C&J bluchers don’t come with suede tassels? Not a problem. When your shoe supplier is also a shoemaker, he emails C&J and requests enough blue suede to make tassels and add them to my shoddings. Aftermarket fuzzy dice on demand. Bam!

Sky's new line of almost Belgians are off the hook.

And they are almost not as expensive as the NYC originals that I’m such a sycophant about. Shut.

SteinMart and Daddy Flusser would be in the queue for round two of Alan Flusser and MyMama or vice damn versa. Why? Because the Flusser goods at SteinMart continue to be tasty, fun and just fuzzy enough to have me pounce on them.

The nylon quilted goods this season are strong and at south of forty bucks, I now own three of these quilted vests.

The FlussMart collection, for the money, is the tastiest thing in the store.

I’d also tell you about Alan ringing my phone one morning. “I’m in a car, headed to Florence to do an appearance at your hometown SteinMart. What’s the name of that barbecue place that you always talk about? And your mom…” Alan asked about going to visit my mom. I demurred, knowing full-well that my hospital bed in the middle of the den, mama would be too embarrassed to receive strangers without me there. But I’ll never forget the gesture.

My baby’s too old for me to revel you with twee little stories about our daddy-daughter vacations and silly antics. But she’s still my baby and I’m so proud of her I could just bust. Burst? Whatever.

And last night she and her dance company sisters did an open house, pre-recital “let’s give the parents an update” kind of revue thing. 

She no longer a little ballerina prancing about on stage. She’s a serious dancer and she has chops.

She was just transitioning out of believing in Santa when I first shared her with you. Thirty-six months from now and, if the Lord tarries, LFG will be off to college.

Onward. 80-G-2

Attention Deficit Disorder Country Ass Meets the Hovey Sisters

On a lighter than usual note…happy Sunday. I figured that it was time for some randomanalia and irreleventia for a change. You know, some impertinence—like the old days. The infrequency of my stories seems to have resulted in me writing tear jerkers when I do. I promise this one will spare you my sleight of hand, “here, look at these clothes” and then BAM, slam you with some gut wrenching update about my mom or other optical waterworks inducing subplots regarding my self-contrived crucible.

As a matter of fact, I’ve done a one-eighty on my mom just as she’s done on us. She has her wheelchair ramp, courtesy of one of the kindest general contractors in Florence (And of course my financial largesse, which by the way, is getting less lar-jay by the minute) and is now able to re-join the outside world. To that end, I expect her to have a part-time job, at minimum, by this coming Friday. I’m serious. No more of this propped up on a hospital bed in the family room, lounging around doing crossword puzzles, watching the Food Network and otherwise living for the moment that Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy come on. I mean. Come on.

My rental property rehab days are finally over. I attached a towel rack to a bathroom and put two more knobs on cabinet doors this week and I’m done. And when I say that I’m done I mean that I will never attempt this again. Actually I won’t have to do such a dramatic rehab again since the place is now back to rental property—"visualize this as your home, prospective tenant"—neutral. Now I just need a tenant. Please. Hurry.

The joy and fun of moving into a little cottage with great bones that offers a stage for me to reinterpret the ADG foppish man-cave…you know…with all my caricature-toy soldiers-rugs-etchings and  other Attention Deficit Disorder Country Ass Meets the Hovey Sisters nuances…has really yet to manifest.

Don’t get me wrong. There have been flurries. But my time and energy have been mostly focused on sorting out the Old Town place. So it’s hard to return from the drywall re-do, nine coats of primer to hide someone’s crazy-ass idea about making a bedroom look like Ralph Lauren’s walk-in damn closet—and then—with prematurely arthritic elbow joints from all of the repetitive (everything one must do to mitigate the half-assness of previous home design accomplishments goat rodeos involves repetitive—motion) motion, giddily ideate how to do the same damn thing in your new/old digs that you are killing yourself to vanquish elsewhere. Crazy. I did manage to devote a wall to my images of Jimmy Whistler.

And the Marlborough Club caricatures, courtesy of Bertie hiring Carlo Pellegrini to draw them, are in the hall.

And Walter Greaves' pastel of Whistler on the Battersea Bridge, along with James Pryde's image of his brother-in-law, William Nicholson ride shotgun above Ernest Haskell's Whistler.

I’m confident that as things settle down over the next month or so, I’ll be able to enjoy my new place.  And I’ll have the unhurried and less burdened time to tweak things here and there and hang another whatever—and God knows—I’ve got an overabundance of whatevers—on the rapidly diminishing wall space. I’m also shedding another round of accumulata. Honestly, I was a bit shocked to see in one place, the aggregate of stuff that I’d piled up and into my office in Old Town, my CasaMinimus and a storage unit that I’ve had around the corner for years. How can one person amass so much sh_t?

 I’m not a hoarder…but only due to one significant characteristic. Hoarders literally cannot let go of anything. You’ve seen that pitiful show on television. When gently prompted to relinquish seven of their nine-thousand, sticky with residual fountain syrup, wax-paper drink cups from Dairy Queen; those people amp-up and go berserk. Or they deflate and sulk and cry. 

Or they launch into a machine-like manifesto, explaining why they have to think about it for a month or so before they finally decide. Butcept that’s the only thing that keeps me from being lumped right in there with ‘em. I’m happily thinning out my cache of tasty accretions and a few of you readers are already recipients of some of it. And there’s a lot more to come. And go. Shut up.

The exception to not having the physical and emotional fuel to daub paint and transform this new place is our work on LFG’s bedroom. Instead of water-thin Glidden ceiling paint at nineteen dollars a gallon, my baby deserved Benjamin Moore. They should call that stuff Benjamin More. Damn. 

So LFG picked a faintly blue-ish white to transform the putty like hue of her bedroom into what’s gonna be a really nice nest for her when we finish. Better paint is worth the money. The stuff went on like butter. Thirty one dollars per gallon More than Glidden.

And as I ponder LFG’s wall color choice and newly selected color and pattern of her pillow cases and duvet cover, I see a young lady. I see someone who in three years has transformed from the little girl who giddily helped me slop vivid paint colors on her bedroom walls as we made her bedroom look like the sequelae from Dr. Seuss and Barney having a wrestling match with the Grateful Dead—to a young lady with decided ideas about how to create a minimalist, uncomplicated palette in her new bedroom. Whose child is this?

Here’s her Old Town bedroom in case you’ve forgotten what a mosh pit of color caca we created over there. Lordy.

Ok so let’s go random for a bit. First up…a Belgians lesson. Do not go over to your rental property with Belgians on and decide to touch up a few things.

Here we have my blue Belgians…still amidst the pre-rubber sole break-in period…now adorned with Valspar High Gloss White…paint. I’m thinking about launching a Jackson Pollock inspired Belgians collaboration. Butcept one of the greatest things about the Belgian Shoe sovereigns is that they don’t give a damn about branding and collaboration and all of the other dressed by the Internet hipster irony that’s part of the edgy sartorial oeuvre. Bottom line is that you shouldn’t paint cabinets when wearing your Belgians.

And it’s not like I don’t have designated shoddings for such endeavors. Just didn’t have them with me at the time.

Let’s go from shoddings to socks. By the way, and this is Florence County South Carolina talking, if the socks cost more than ten dollars a pair, they’re hose. Yep. It’s a prissy word no doubt. But you just can’t call something that costs more than what an ounce of dope cost in 1974…socks. Not my rule—and God knows I’m not bashful about admonishments and rules—but I’m abiding by it. Oh, and for the record, seriously, I have no idea what an ounce of dope costs today. "V.K. Nagrani" ... sounds like a combination Campari-esque drink and a personal lubricant. "Baby, take a sip of THIS!" Shut up.

The lovely diamond spritzed leg sheathings preened above are from Coffman’s in Greenville, North Carolina. One of the highlights of the last year has been discovering this little sartorial oasis that’s about forty minutes off the beaten track of my I-95 to mama’s house sojourn.

Chief Hog Farmer F. Todd Howell sent me a gaggle of socks to say yes-no to. FTH, knowing full well that I lack the willpower to say no to all of them, assured himself some level of register ringing ROI for his effort. After all, there's baby formula to buy. "Baby, take a sip of THAT!" So I kept three and sent three back.

And finally, a quick up and back last Monday to Gotham saw me lunching with a sartorial legend and our stunning mutual friend…a woman to whom I proposed marriage after one glass of wine. A daytime record for me. And no, my sartorial legend lunch mate wasn’t George Frazier. As my friend ADF said regarding the housekeeper’s response shouted above the vacuum cleaner whir, to her inquiry regarding where the family dog was when Sparky failed to meet her at the door… “He dead!”  Surely I’d a given a pretty penny to've had lunch with Frazier at Locke-Ober's…replete with his standing order of Finnan Haddie and a Bloody Mary—with a dash of celery salt. R.I.P. Frazier, Locke-Ober's and Sparky.

No. I popped the Frazier photo in here because of his Russell Plaid suit. I’m on the record for having an insatiable curiosity about Russell Plaid for quite some time now. But it’s a tricky medium and even though I didn’t know exactly what I wanted. I knew for certain what I didn’t. And most of what I’ve seen on the rack, I didn’t.

I’ll leave the rest of the Russell story for later when the finished work rolls in. For now though, trust me when I tell you that this one’s gonna be a doozy.

A doozy. Yep, it’s worth using that descriptor one more time as my blessed life has been one for most of 2013. The warm weather stunner above was supposed to be my Spring-Summer 2013 go-to fun jacket. And I began the bespokeydoke process with Rykken et al on this one way back in November 2012. But then my world blew up and it was last Monday that I finally got ‘round to the next to the last fitting. The thing’s been sitting in Paul Stuart for almost a year. Good news is that I’ll be busting warm-weather 2014 wide open in it. Maybe.

Ok, that’s it. Time to prep for Toronto. Leaving on Monday to help the Canadians figure out how to get long acting anti-schizophrenia medicines bumped up to preferred reimbursement status by the Provincial health plans. And you thought all I knowed about was…. Whatever.

Onward.

ADG II

I Have Nothing To Say

So listen up. If you’ve read my drivel for any length of time you might remember the randomanalia posts. Well really--all of them are random to a great degree but I used to pile on a huge load of irreleventia from time to time when I didn’t have the focus for a vaguely more cogent yarn. 2013 has seen me thus far mired in a zero bandwidth and nil focus stew pot when it comes to telling stories so I figured I’d drop a poorly edited pile on y’all this morning.

This was desert. Last night. Desert last night at the home of a guy who like me, has a delightful daughter and an affection for Alden shoes. He also has a lovely wife and a really cool son. Oh, and a network of eclectic, smart, grounded and delightful friends. A gaggle of whom shared in the fellowship with my dinner hosts last night. I’d never met face-to-face my Alden pal till last night. We’ve threatened to have a drink together for a year now but you know how it goes. Life is busy. But I was determined to not let anything get in the way of last night’s dinner invitation from Alden Guy.

So why do I share this? Because most of the reasons I continue to blog are the reasons I did so in the first place and they are predominantly superficial. But there’s also been an anything but superficial result of this blog. I’ve met some really great people and I’m gratified to know that some of them will be lifelong friends... the kind of friends who will take your call at 3am if you need them. I’d like to think that I’d do the same for them. Ask Toad.

My blessed but manic life isn’t special. My joys and challenges can easily be trumped by others who are also trying to navigate their day-to-day journeys with gratitude and sanity. But the odyssey of my mom’s illness is one for the record books and as I’ve said before, I will write about it somewhere—but not here. I know way too much about healthcare to just accept some of the shit that has been passed off as the care continuum for geriatric chronic disease and end of life management. My humble advice to you is if you have a family member who is deeply mired in this goat rodeo of a healthcare system we have in the States, you better find an informed advocate to question every damn thing done for you beloved. This saga has wrung me and my sibs out...emotionally, physically and, if we had any, intellectually.

On a happier note, my mom is lucid, cogent and fighting daily to get well enough to go home. It is amazing to see and we hold no false hope about how long we may have her. And if she can get home for even a few months—with daily nursing care—it will be fantastic. All I know is that if she dies tomorrow, the recent moments that I’ve had with her…moments where she and I have been able to once again have reflective, tender and deep conversations are gifts of inestimable value. Why? Because in March we took her off the respirator so that she could die yet now, she’s flipping the bird at the physical therapy people who are putting her through rigorous paces. Life is rich. And I swear to God that till now, I never saw my mom flip anyone off. Ever. When I was growing up. Shut up.

So let’s get to the superficial stuff. I’ve had two jackets awaiting a first fitting at my man Puerto Rykken’s Paul Stuart atelier since last December. That’s how damn crazy my world’s been. So last Tuesday I finally bit the bullet and did an Amtrak up and back in the same day to get fitted as well as drop in on a couple of other Gotham destinations. My go-to navy blazer is so ratty that I sorely needed to replace it. Now I have other ones—my blazers see more action than anything else in or out of my closet but my go-to sees the most combat. Instead of replacing it identically, I opted for hacking pockets versus three open patch. It’s gonna be strong. Trust me. Or not. I don’t give a damn ‘cause you ain’t gonna be wearin’ it. Shut up.

And my summer 2013 jacket, which based on the delay in getting it fitted, I’ll be able to wear for maybe three weeks, is a linen-wool-silk contrivance that’s gonna be sublime. The coloring is really gonna enhance my jaundice and the cut? Hugely complimentary to my alcoholic malnourished attenuatiousness.

I'm going to write a story about Made-to-Measure, Custom and Bespoke processes and the differences. Don't ask me when I'll get around to it. I have no idea. But I can tell you unequivocally that what my man Rykken is doing for me over at Paul Stuart is anything but some demi-ass MTM sleight of hand. It's as close to Savile Row paper pattern cutting as I'll ever need. 

Three-two roll—peak lapels—hacking flaps including ticket—double vented. With a half-vinyl top. Bam!

So after my Rykken fitting and before the train slog home, I dropped in on the Belgian Mother Church to see what, if anything was new. And I defined new as a pair of monochromatic calfskin navies. And I ordered another monochromatic-contrivance that’ll be here probably around Labor Day if I’m lucky. Stay tuned. Or not.

Oh, and thanks to those over at my tumblr who helped me select that next round of kilim slips from Pammie-Jane over at Nomad Ideas. Typically, I ignored the feedback of the majority and did my own thang. And these thangs I like.

Anyone care to guess what trad purveyor occupied this space for years?  I passed it in midtown last week and once again had that pang of regret for having missed their salad days. Hint? "GTH Mother Church."

Let me close this out with an update on one L. F. G. She finished the school year having made nothing less than all A’s. She’s becoming such a lovely young adult and it’s killing me every step of the way. Y’all told me it was typical-predictable-boilerplate and text book. But I still don’t have to like it.

But I know she loves me. The latest evidence includes her agreement to take me to the Toy Soldier Shop in D.C. and select my Father’s Day present(s).  

She squealed with glee when she was younger as I’d sit on the front steps of the shop while she and Mister Neil narrowed down my broad choices and boxed and wrapped them. This most recent round of “pick daddy’s present” was at least tolerated with stoic elegance.

Ok. That’s enough drivel for now. Onward. Kinda. With two Brooks Brethren striped BDs that were on sale.

ADG II