The Texture of Christmas--2014

Texture-Pattern-Shape-Color…tactile and visual attributes. It’s no secret that the fuzzier for me the better. Until now.

Restraint? Well I’m not gonna go overboard. But I do think in my old-er age I might be pulling back just a teeny bit from my Southern, country ass, GTH togged “look at me, look at me” cornpone sprezzatura. Who knows, maybe I’m unwittingly slipping into a phase of official mourning. Somber, black crepe hanging attire included. Queen Victoria did it after Albert died. And God knows she loved Albert better than Peter loved the Lord. That’s almost as much as I loved my mama. False alarm. I just realized that if you’ve unwittingly slipped into something, it’s kinda hard to then deem it official upon arrival. Hold me. I’m confused. Unofficially.

Case in point regarding my new, albeit just a teeny-tiny scooch over towards modulated fuzzy moderation…I took a pass on this orange corduroy Ralph jacket the other day. I’m only six weeks into orphanhood and it just seemed damn wrong on all levels to consider taking title to it. Plus I didn’t go to Clemson or Princeton or Tennessee or Florida or any of those other schools that claim orange as one of their school hues.

But forty years of mourning? I do think Victoria took it a bit too far. What with only wearing black and refusing to leave Balmoral for ages on end and using nothing but black bordered mourning stationery for the rest of her chubby little roly-poly life. Johnny Cash is the only fella who had the color black’s permission to singularly don it for decades on end. And he wasn’t mourning a damn thing.

Apropos of her forty years of black creped-ness, Vanity Fair reissued their original portrait of Queen Victoria in monochrome black with a mourning border when she finally joined Albert and Jesus in 1901.

Here’s the colorful original version from Vanity Fair—June 17 1897.

And another thing about Queen Victoria before we move on…What we don’t know for sure is whether or not she was getting some real bereavement comfort from her trusted ghillie John Brown. I sure hope so. And I’m not just talking about the therapeutic benefits of long walks and talks. We all know that they did a bunch of that. Lord knows I can talk. And walking still comes easy. I’m thinking I need me one of them constant bereavement companions for a while. Butcept a girl one. With benefits.

The texture of my 2014 Christmas has so far been rough and smooth. I’m alone but not lonely. My heart is still heavy—now magnified by this being the first Christmas without my mama—but I’m not wallowing in it. I drove home yesterday. In a MINI Cooper. John Cooper Works performance edition to be exact ("Performance Edition"MINI...ain't that a hoot?)...with my prostate seven inches off of I-95 for 7.5 hours. I need another car. And a smaller...

I’m typing this from my childhood cowboy bedroom and the monastic silence of being here alone isn’t depressing at all. LFG is in Florida, my brother is around the corner at his house and I’ve reconnected with a bunch of childhood friends who are here for the holidays. So I’m by myself in this once boisterous and noisy holiday house but I’m ok. I had a visceral, primal need to be here so here I am.

A tree? Of course. I’ll never have an artificial one but since I was solo this Christmas I didn’t need a big one of any type. So I nabbed a piccolo fir and just donned it with my favorite ornaments.

And thanks to Susie and Dougie for sending me presents. Otherwise the tree wouldn’t a been the only thing attenuated.

Back to texture and pattern...I had to put on real clothes the other day and make some business and personal rounds. And I coulda put on some GTH Christmas corduroy embroidered caca trousers and some retail red waistcoating like all the other holiday revellers. But I didn’t. Remember, I’m in mourning.

So it was a navy blazer and my Daddy Flusser semi-GTH Bronco Buster wool challis togs. Oh, and my Meermins which are holding up just fine in year-two by the damn way. Shut up. 

And I even got a mourning haircut. I figure another year and my follicular vacancies will be such that I’ll go back to cutting the remaindered sprigs myself.

My bereavement is evident in this Polo Chevy Chase selfie that I took while out and about. Time will bring back my smirky little pinch mouthed puckishness. But time has deemed six weeks not enough.

Oh, and by the way…don’t dress like this and visit a retail establishment lest you want them to think you work there. I don’t.

And I tried on a few things that I can’t buy. Including this bereavement brown vest. Buy it for me.

Maybe brown is my mourning color.

Kinda. Brownish green-essence with a green leather club chair. I mean really…how damned crepe laden can a fuzzy-ass flâneur like me become?

Brown. It’s a restrained color ain’t it? But who says the texture-pattern thang has to be? I vote no and you should too.

I’m gonna close this drivel load now. It’s off to the shower and off to lunch. Christmas just ain't Christmas this year. But it's ok.

Onward. Rough and Smooth.

80-g-2

Holiday Miscellany

And miscellany this shall be. Shut up.

Oh…but before you shut up and I take over; let me pop this story with something sartorial. Because it seems like that’s what this venue used to focus on. I need to confess my guilt…about over-fuzzying this jacket. I’ve taken a perfectly sublime, ain’t gonna see ones-damn-self walking down the street in the same Russell Plaid jacket, ADG tasty contrivance…and tarted it up so over-the-damn-top-ly that even I, the Potentate of P-tang, can’t wear it out of the damn house. 

So I’ll have that Velveteen Rabbit meets a Vegas hotel suite sofa cushion collar…removed. And then I’ll write a proper story about how this jacket came to be. Shut…I’m serious. I don’t want to hear it.

I’ve said it to scores of people…While my blessings absurdly outweigh my challenges, I’ll be giddy when 2013 is over. It’s been a rich year, life-learning wise and my lessons learned-humility account is filled to the damn brim. My pugnacious declarations regarding my desire for 2013 to pass are  balanced with the knowing that if I crow too much about ’13 being behind us, the karma coordinators may show me a 2014 that makes this one look like a stroll through Burlington Arcade. It’s all about balance. Or something.

And one of the most amazing blessings this year has been my mother’s decision to not yet leave us. I believe, deep, deep, down in my being, that if we; amidst chronic disease or the end of our life journey, have some unfinished something that we've yet to reconcile or say or do or experience, we won’t let go. I’m not sure why my mom didn’t die in March. All I know is that the doctors remain pretty much speechless and when science and data driven clinicians use twee-ass words like miracle, I take notice. So amidst the humbling—for her and us—duties involved with helping my mom, we are all aware that every day she remains with us is indeed a blessing.

I drove over to spend one evening with her after my uncle’s funeral the other day and she was to say the least, on her game! Sharp as a damn tack and in my grill about how I was arranging her leg pillows and her three blankets that have to be just damn right and her little footies that I put on her feet inside-out and you’d a thought that I’d chopped her feet off. And then we laughed after I finally, barely, got things arranged to suit her.

I hadn't been to the family farm in years so my trip down was filled with all sorts of memories and speculations about how I’d feel when I got there. While it’s sad to see the once bustling tobacco farms essentially idle—mainly because it’s winter—we rent the land to other sower-reapers so during the seasons, there is life and activity and the fallow fields are planted and life emanates. But I loved being there and my uncle’s funeral was sweet. More later on the farm because there’s fodder for at least one story.

Before…

After…And yes, I realize that you're doing the “what the flip is this project ‘cause I know that LFG ain’t a part of it” head scratch right now. Well just wait till I write the story. 

Socks…I told you this was gonna be a disjointed pile of irreleventia and collateralia. My latest obsession is with these oversized houndstooth thangs that F. Todd HogFarmer Howell of Coffman’s Menswear has been sending me…NOT for free. I pay the freight because my man FTH has a lovely little gal to spoil and I know what kinda dough that requires. So when I find something I like, I get duplicates and I’ve had FTHogg, the most mismatched swathier alive, supply me some spares of these babies.

And I owe my man Vinnie of DeoVeritas shirts a story and review of this bulletproof pink oxford cloth shirt that I commissioned over at his site. So until I do so, please go over to his fully automated, order with ease website and make yourself one. Please.

LFG was supposed to be over here at my Bethesda digs like every other day after I moved within five minutes of her, right? I mean...wasn’t that the strategy for moving here? Well so far it ain’t happenin’. What was I thinking? That her blessed and over-scheduled life would suddenly be less so? Christmas is in six days and we still ain’t got no tree. I’m gonna go and buy an inflatable one today.

But her holiday dance recital last weekend was just great. Surprise I know, but I’m as proud a parent when in the audience as anyone could be…regardless of how the performances go.

This year was different though. I can see real talent and I can see an incrementally more skilled and accomplished dancer in my not so little LFG. Her mother and I both marvelled at how this year’s recital showed us a daughter who’s a really talented performer. And then I went home. Alone.

Meermin…If anyone should pay me for shilling…which to-date nobody has, it should be Meermin. At $240.00 a throw, I’m awaiting pair number two. Merry Christmas. To. Me.

Let me close this one out with my mom’s next door neighbor, Harry. I shared photos of Harry and my mom when we finally got her out of the house and Harry bounded over to love up on her. I posted this on my tumblr but it’s sublime enough to share again. The best by far, Christmas card of 2013.

Onward. Randomly and Houndstoothically.

Eighty-Gee. Bofe

Oh! And one more thing. My all-time favorite Christmas song is Boogie Woogie Santa Claus sung by Mabel Scott. But her admonition for Santa to ... "run, run, run Mister Santa--jump, jump, jump Mister Santa" disturbs me. He's overweight and probably a type-2 diabetic with mild congestive heart failure. And we don't need his jolly ass on Worker's Comp. bam.

Turkey Miscellany—Conroy-Meermin-and Stein Mart Serpentining

*It’s Sunday morning December 1^st. I began this little ditty on Thanksgiving morn but never got around to finishing it. I’m back in Bethesda now and LFG is again with her mom so the deafening silence of my house is just perfect for completing such drivel. Many of you know that spellcheck is the best I do with these things—clean-up wise. But I did notice that I've overused the word “ass” in this story and I’m not inclined to change it. Sometimes words…even ones that debase, cheapen or accelerate a sentence…can’t be replaced and their redundancy is immutable. Shut up.

I’ve got stuff to say. More precise stuff. Stuff that with just a bit of editorial rigor would have you in syncopating tears of laughter and joy. But precision and editorial curettage ain’t gonna be part of this pile. Mainliest reason is that it’s Thanksgiving morning and at 913am all remains quiet in my childhood home and I don’t want to be precise and rigorous. Plus I’m a little gassy.

LFG is asleep in my sister’s childhood bedroom and my big-ole baby brother is in the room that circumstances dictated I had to share with his little late to the family party ass. I’ve yet to hear my mom stir but then again, she’s been keeping late hours these days. What with all the QVC and Food Network watching and her never miss Alec’s Jeopardy and what not. My mom…this not yet finished with life gal is busy these days.

Every Thanksgiving for the last forever…forever being probably the last three or four years…I’ve said “well, this is surely the last one that mom’s gonna be healthy enough to cook her formidable spread for us”. And now that time is upon us. Kinda. I sat at the kitchen table last night watching my mom convey bark in as strong a voice as she’s ever had, all of the intricacies and process steps involved in preparing her cornbread dressing and various other loved-by-all turkey day concoctications. And she was passing the cypher not to me but to my baby brother. He was doing the doing and I was doing the watching.

And then I remembered that this reaper reprieve my mom is amidst may be temporal so I asked her to recite to me the secret code for a few of my childhood faves from her kitchen oeuvre. I jotted as fast as she would recollect and she got predictably miffed when I asked her about measures and amounts. “I don’t know. Just taste it ‘till you like it.” That’s my mom. And probably yours too…unless you had one of those mamas that didn’t cook and if you did I feel real sorry for you.

I’m an emotional coward. I’ve long since reconciled it and after fifty-plus years, have actually come to own it. Owning is stronger than reconciling for you mugwumps who have nothing better to do than read blogs with some kind of copy editor ass attitude. Ok? Ok. So I’m sitting here in the living room this morning and there’s some kinda weird comfort about reading Conroy’s book in the house where similar sounds of conflict emanated and identical conditions of gastric twisted upness escalated as my father’s car came down the driveway—usually way too late for dinner.

And the later my dad’s arrival, the more strangulated my little belly became. The strength of his whiskey breath was indexed to the lateness of his arrival. So why the comfort? Even though Conroy found some reconciliation with his father—something I’ll never have—my dad was a f_cking saint compared to this sometimes monster Santini who lorded over Pat’s life.

I’ll never be able to explain the gut twist associated with not knowing which dad we would get when the door opened…a happy, mawkish dad with a buzz or a drunker, meaner man.  And the gut twist was an odd one. It wasn’t nausea. Nowhere near it actually. It was more of a “we better shut down your alimentary tract for the next three days as you haul ass across the savannah…zig-zag like...in an effort to outrun that big-ass cat.” Kind of a serpentine scurry while being shot at a la Peter Falk and Alan Arkin in The In-Laws… “serpentine, Shel, serpentine”.  I think I’ve landed on a working title for the childhood segment of my memoirs…No Time to Dooky. 

And finally, let me offer an apology to Pat Conroy—as if he’s sitting there yearning for one. I flippantly defined all of his non-novel caliber books as filler and place holders for the real things…his more robust word candy stuff that a zillion of us have come to love. I was wrong. After finishing The Death of Santini last night, I realized that the book is (hopefully for the tortured Conroy) a cathartic and necessary opus that’s anything but filler. My childhood and my life journey in general has been nirvana compared to the Conroy clan. Shut the f…

Once again I’ve managed to turn this little ditty into a maudlin pile of whateverishness. So let’s go superficial. And Meermin shoes are as good a place as any to launch my shallow vessel. The first pair that I ordered…$240.00 bucks all-in…represented a curious itch that I had to scratch and at that price I was willing to gamble. Double the price and it would be fair, almost necessary, to ask the proverbial…“yeah but what will they look like a year from now?” Well I can tell you that I’m wearing the hell out of suede pair number one and I’m sure that a year from now I’ll say that I’ve more than gotten my money’s worth.

So early last week I queued up for pair number two. This time I’m sampling the scotch grained monks avec the ersatz Dainite sole. At this rate/price, my Cleverley bespoke days might be over. But not till my bespoke carpincho bluchers arrive. Hold me.

And after next week…my last billable week for the year, I’ll write a comprehensive story about my maiden Paul Stuart bespoke voyage with my buddy Mark "Puerto" Rykken. I figured a navy blazer was a good place to start since I’ve never had one.

Ok. I lied. Hell, I took two of them to South Carolina for Thanksgiving. It’s the little black dress of man clothes. Shut.

While I was home I popped over to Stein Mart and the Flusser goods have gone from tasty to just damn showing-ass-off. Paisley corduroy GTH jackets and of course, no pixie sizes for fellas like me. They know their local chubby market.

 I figure that the half dozen GTH cord jackets at Stein Mart Florence…smallest in-stock size...44 Regular…will go to the four, type-2 diabetes totin’, barbecue eatin’ (not that there’s anything wrong with that) effeminate heterosexual guys in town and the other two…well.

My phone rang recently and it was the Fluss himself. En route to Florence and a book signing at Stein Mart. I was touched that he asked about going by and seeing my mama and I was even more delighted when he asked me to put him on a lunch spot fitting for a Buddhist non-kosher Jewish boy from Gotham. So I sent him to Rogers Barbecue. That’s the Great Flusstini with my best childhood buddy AWH.

The onliest Flusser thing available at Stein Mart in my size was a cashmere sweater. I pounced at fiddy-nine dollahs. Bam.

So let me close out this turgid wad of irreleventia with an update on the ADG Cracker Code. It looks like I barely made the cut. Not that my DNA is gonna be too hard to map (I DO want my report thang to come back with a profile that has me sorted out with DNA including some Neanderthal, a dose of Ashkenazi and some sliver of African in there too. I mean really...I'm already interesting to have at cocktail parties and cookouts but damn...If I can say with DNA evidence, that I'm one of the first families of earth with a smidge of Yiddish and a dash of Zulu, I'm gonna be hard to stop.) but it appears that the FDA has requested that 23andMe stop selling their tests. I’m sure they’ll get it all sorted out and in the meantime, here’s to hoping that the 23andMeMinions are hard at work unravelling my serpentinescent code.

Onward.

ADG-Two. Serpentining.