Holy
crap in a Bundt pan...
Due to the
recent well-publicized shortage of
amateur websites produced by assholes who consider themselves to be
clever, I
have been called into action. My name is Jeff Kay, and I’m an
Ugly American living
on the cusp of a mid-life crisis, near Scranton, PA. And I’m here to
serve, baby.
The
State of My Fat Ass A journal of
sorts, updated every once in a while.
--I think I grew up at the height of the tighty-whitey era.I haven’t researched it, of course, that would be incredibly
creepy.But it’s what I believe.
As best as I can tell, all boys in the 1970s wore the same kind of
underwear, and it was the style Spongebob
currently favors.In fact, I
wasn’t even aware of any alternatives.Oh, we’d sometimes happen upon plastic tubes of animal-print
flyless mini-briefs at JCPenney or Sears, but those were just put there
for comic relief, I think.I
mean, seriously.My brother and I
would howl with laughter.
No, there was no known deviation from the norm.We all wore the same stuff, and it wasn’t even something to
consider.It was purely a
functional item, designed to throw up a cottony barrier between your
jeans and your junk, and cut down on the friction a banana seat can
create.And to the dismay of
mothers everywhere, it also served as a nifty air filter.
There was nothing more to it; it was like putting on a third sock.Nowadays kids have Ninja Turtles doing battle across their butt
cheeks, and Spiderman swinging out of God knows where.But we had nothing of the sort; there were no fashion
calculations to be made.It was
either tighties or the Schwinn supernova, and those were your choices.
In those days there was a seam running up the sides, I recall, as if the
fronts and backs were created separately then sewn together.I don’t think it’s like that anymore, I believe the
practitioners of underwear science have made giant leaps forward over
the years.
I wonder if it was more prestigious to work on “fronts” than
“backs” at the Fruit of the Loom factories back then?After all, the fronts are far more complicated affairs; the back
is just one big sheet of material.Wonder
if folks went out for celebratory dinners after being promoted to briefs
fronts?Wonder if anyone has ever
been the recipient of a front-themed toast in a restaurant or bar?Wonder if people were sometimes busted back to backs for
insubordination?
Yeah, these are questions I’d never pondered until today….
And so it went, for many years.I
saw no reason to make any changes.Why
should I?They served their
purpose nicely, and I’d only witnessed one catastrophic tighty-whitey
malfunction in all my days.In
high school I watched a guy (who is now a big-time insurance hotshot)
receive a wedgie so atomic in nature the entire waistband came off.
But
that was a single isolated incident, and word on the street was that the
underwear was already in pretty sad shape before the wedgie even
commenced.
So I had no reason to alter my course.Until I reached my early twenties, anyway….That’s when I suffered my first and only undergarment crisis of
faith.
My longtime girlfriend and I broke up, and I was suddenly faced with dating.I started questioning everything, all the way down to my
skivvies.Perhaps it wasn’t so cool to be sporting the same style of
draws third-graders wear?Maybe the ladies don’t care for that sort of thing anymore?
I was entering uncharted territory, my friends, and it was all fairly
unnerving.But I made the leap to boxers cold turkey.I tossed all my old underwear into the dumpster behind the
apartment, and replaced it with a stack of striped and checkered boxer
shorts.
And thus began the most uncomfortable year and a half of my life.
There was a glacier effect that I hadn’t counted on.Over the course of a day everything would move southward, I
found, slower than the human eye can perceive, until I ended up with a
situation to contend with.Then I’d find myself doing these freaky little knee-bends, and
constantly wanting to make “adjustments.”
I hated it, but fought the urge to backslide.Sometimes I’d pass displays of the old underwear in stores, and
sigh sadly.You’re too old, I told myself, and would venture on, a-pinching
and a-tugging, and doing virtual squat ‘n’ thrusts in the blender
aisle.
Then I started dating a woman who said to me one night, “Why do you
wear that old- grandpa underwear?”This was the eighties, and apparently it wasn’t yet cool to
wear boxer shorts.And that’s all I needed to know.It was one of the happiest days of my life.I practically danced to Target.
Since then I’ve dabbled in other styles, and made a few minor changes.Oh, nothing too exotic….I never went to the tubes, or the poofter designers, or any of
that strange European stuff with the horizontal wiener slots.Just some minor age-appropriate tweaks to the original formula.
And, I’m proud to announce, I am once again completely at ease with my
underwear.
Now, if you folks would like to break up into individual discussion
groups and explore this essay further, please do so.Footnotes and bibliographical information available upon request.
