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I made a momentous and life-changing decision today. I threw out all my pants that predate my marriage. They hadn’t even got small holes in (though are a bit baggy and uncomfortable) but I decided I couldn’t live my life trying to wear out old pants, whilst new pants were sitting there waiting for me. I know which pants predate my wedding because I changed brands on the shopping trip where I bought the stuff I was going to wear on the big day (so technically a few pairs might have been in my position before the ball and chain were officially attached). So any of my Calvin Cline boxers are at least six and a half years old and probably a good deal older. I think a decade of use probably offsets even the exorbitant cost of today’s gentlemen’s underwear.
Some of those pants must date back to the days when I was single, pre-2008. What stories they could tell if they could talk. And also see. And remember stuff. Thank God they can’t. Imagine your pants constantly going on about the indiscretions of your past. You’d have to be some kind of pervert to be looking forward to the invention of knickers with cognitive abilities. It’s the danger that they might blurt out your secrets and lies that makes it exciting for me. Also the fact that they will surely protest when you use them as a wank rag. I mean if someone used them as a wank rag. I wouldn’t do that.
I would assume that some of those pants are so old they might legally be able to get married by now (though only with my permission).
I have new pants. They are comfortable and non-baggy though still at the stage where they are shedding cotton and leaving me flecked with black specks when I take them off. I should enjoy my new pants now, rather than leaving them unsoiled in a drawer to pass on down to a relative when I die. No one wants to wear a dead man’s pants, but if he has never worn those pants then that’s an extra, unexpected and untaxable treat for the next generation (though I do like the idea of the taxman insisting on keeping and wearing one pair).
I didn’t give my appalling underwear to charity. I didn’t turn them into cloths for cleaning (like my mum used to do with my dad’s pants). I threw it in the bin. It was liberating. My genitals and arse will now only be shod in the finest of pants. Perhaps I should put a “Don’t Wear†date on them. How long will the new batch last? Keep an eye on this blog for the next 18 or so years to find out. I love them now, but they will find a home, dumped unceremoniously in the bin, just like their once-loved forebears, as soon as conscious underwear has been invented.
I also started the job of reorganising our refurbished attic space, which will be used as office space for me and my wife and also as the new Self-Playing Snooker arena. The guys who’d put in the carpet had moved my desk from one corner of the room to another. I was annoyed that I’d have to move it back until I realised it fitted much better where they’d put it, plus there was a little window ledge there that I could keep pictures on and a slightly nicer view for when I was failing to write. I don’t know why I had originally selected the other corner, but hadn’t even considered this far superior corner (which is crazy as the desk is more or less designed to go in a corner and the fit in this one was pretty much perfect). Also there is now adequate room for the snooker board (which admittedly is a bad thing - it’s so much better with obstacles, but this could lead to it becoming a commercial success for people who want more professional self-playing snooker).
This is a Sliding Doors moment (as every moment of everyone’s life is). Imagine the different scripts I would have written over in the rubbish corner, compared to this slightly better one. I mean the scripts might be worse, but they will definitely be different.
And my whole life will change, purely as a result of this happenstance. And so will yours now. For a start you’ve had to waste a few seconds reading about it, and otherwise you’d have been doing something else. The knock on from this extra bit of writing will have untold repercussions. At least one of you will now be in a place you wouldn’t have been in had I not written this and end up dying. Sorry about that. But also I have probably saved one of you from being hit on the head by a failing piano (or something) and I hope you will thank me for that.
But I weirdly feel much happier on this side of the room. I am glad I am in this Universe, rather than the sad one of that Richard Herring, writing shit stuff on the other side of the room.
