Postmodern Jukebox

I don't really go to Kohl's, but sometimes you have a specific need. It's not that I object to Kohl's spiritually or philosophically, and I don't have any insider information about their products coming from Bangladeshi children's sweatshop labor (though that's safe to assume for any major American retail after all, especially since January when we officially stopped checking) or anything. I just don't like the feeling of going up to the register without any "Kohl's cash" and getting that combo look of pity and contempt from the cashiers. I know how to shop, Marlene, I just don't need your store for anything regularly. And why can't you just have an inscrutable and dubious "loyalty" system like other stores? They just straight up harvest your data for little or no benefit; they treat you like an adult.

But, sometimes you're at work wearing your decade-plus-old Levi's and the crotch fails on you and you have to make a move. Especially if you're pretty much all by yourself still doing that Lenten boycott of Target everyone was so excited about in February but seemed to immediately forget about. But it wouldn't have mattered anyway, because there's one thing and one thing only I exclusively go to Kohl's for and that is Levi's. For whatever reason, the discount department store is the home of what I call the Jeans Wall, an enormous honeycomb of cubbies containing the widest range of immediately available cuts, sizes and colors of Levi's known to man. Sure, you could get even more variety on the web these days, but I'm old school: I like to buy my pants only after I know some other unknowable number of men have slid their crotches and asses into the same pair. Also you get to try them on and take them home the same day, zero shipping. Nobody loses!

I brought help in the form of my girlfriend, of course, because men shopping alone is how you end up with... well, pretty much exactly what they went shopping for. What. you thought I was going to lapse into some lame gender cliché "joke" about how you send a man out to shop for pants and he comes back with a power tool, some brown liquor and not only no new pants, but not even the pants he left the house with? OK, I can see how that would have had potential, I should have gone that way, I apologize.

I showed up at Kohl's wearing shorts, because I knew I wanted to be in and out of the changing rooms as fast as possible, but that meant I had to try to remember what kind of jeans I was replacing. These are all Levi's, so we're talking about a 500-range number and a waste and inseam size, that's it. I knew the busted ones were 569s (nice), but apparently the world has moved on from droopy-ass oversize jeans with legs each individually as wide as your waist. Or so I thought! Turns out the 1990s are having something of a moment, so I found 565s in a "vintage 1997 cut" and I was in.

And then I just WENT CRAZY because I thought: what if I had more than two pairs of jeans? I mean, I have to go into the office every day because the president who thinks windmills cause cancer says, in his wisdom, I have to. If I'm going to be a fancy office business man, I might as well have the wardrobe! So I try to think of what my other pair of jeans are (branching out isn't really my thing. If we're replacing, we're replacing. The word means what it means), so I'll have to wing it. I stress out because the loose 565s fit at a 34-inch waist, but all the other ones are pushing me to 36 inches, which my vanity is absolutely appalled by. But my girlfriend didn't seem to mind, so my vanity was told to go fuck itself (vanity's favorite pastime anyway) and I ended up embracing the new me with a totally different (non-loose or "relaxed") cut--505s--with the very-mature 36-inch waist. These are big leaps for the disorderedly anxious mind that craves the security of continuity above all. Real growth, I'm sure my therapist would say, all for the low price of $60 per pair.

So I come home feeling the way you feel when you get somewhere new, beyond yourself (loudly barked "ah-HA!" laughs at the slightest amusement, finger guns at strangers, random interjections of self-help-sounding phrases in every conversation no matter how contextually uncalled for), all of which I'm dead certain my partner found charming. I wander upstairs to put the new gotten symbols of little transcendence away when I decide to check my old jeans (the non-ripped ones, where I couldn't remember what they were) to see just how far I've come and they are: Levi's 505s with a 36-inch waist.

OK, fine, I like what I like. I bought what felt good. Not only had I not grown emotionally, I hadn't even grown physically like I thought I had. Robbed even of the acceptance of my aging, failing, fattening body by the fact that I've apparently been on the same aging/failing/fattening stage since like 2006 or whenever I bought these old ones. Fuck.

I guess the moral of the story is: you don't understand history unless you actually look shit up. And the lack of diligence means an inevitable repeat of past choices; not even mistakes necessarily, just that feeling of walking in the woods certain that you're getting somewhere only to realize you've seen all these trees before. Hiking is fun, but the circles can be dangerous. In my case, it's just a tiny bit of emotional letdown but still, I've got comfortable jeans out of it. It's not like anyone got disappeared to El Salvador without trial or due process in a continuation of protocols from previous administrations in the name of combating "terrorism." That analogy would be super inappropriate in a case like this! I will definitely not be making it!