Admission: I wear the same pants and/or shorts the whole week. I don't have the time nor energy to wash clothes after I wear a pair for only one freakin' day. Besides -- a pair of pants is still good enough to wear after one day. All this "I need to change clothes every day" crap is ridiculous.
The only downside to that is when my, uh, principle runs right into my, uh, insistence that I keep wearing pants as long as I can keep wearing them. I am a fat man, I'm afraid, and despite all my inveighing, I'm still fat and I'm probably getting fatter. Still, I keep pants I've bought five, ten -- shoot, 15 years ago if they still fit me. Well, I should qualify that: If they still barely fit me. I have donated pants if they are too small for me. But, if I suck my gut in, arc my back just so and get the waistline and the smallest part of my waist, and the button clips shut, hell yeah I'm wearin' it!
So it is with these Route 66 khakis that I wore for work for the week. I bought these from ... well, it's Route 66, so I guess the old K-Mart? ... many, many years ago. I needed Khakis, I think I bought them knowing full well K-Mart was dying and this store might be closed down at any moment, and I'm still obsessed with driving Route 66 at some point before I die.
I'm pretty sure they fit me back when I first bought them. But that was then. On Tuesday, the start of my workweek, I slipped them on. I don't know if you guys do this, but as soon as I put both of my legs into a pair of pants, I size up how much width I have in them. If I can tell that it's not going to be much, I know that I'm wearing an old pair of pants ... and that getting into them could be a challenge. Such was the case with this one, and I had to do a lot of bending with the back and the hips and the knees in order to close that damn thing shut. Still, it was noticeable how small for my body it is. It was at its worst Thursday after I used the bathroom at work. I think then that I closed my pants farther up my hips, and it thus enclosed around my belly and organs like a boa constrictor. It truly was uncomfortable, painfully so. But then I readjusted it by sitting it lower and closer to my hips, and I felt fine, like I did with those pants on for most of the rest of the week.
Through it all, I didn't burst through my pants. What I mean by that is, my button never popped out. You've seen that visual joke where a fat man stretches a small set of pants so much the button pops out, flies across the room and, like, lands in a champagne flute, whereby some unsuspecting matron of the city drinks it whole and starts choking on the button? That's actually happened to me before. Well, not the button flying across the room and into a champagne glass, but the popping of said button. Embarrassing, to say the least. It should have happened to these Route 66 khakis; should've happened a long time ago, in fact. But those size 32 suckers are still holding it in. And I have to point out that as other pants have gotten too small for me and/or started tearing around the legs and/or developing holes in my pockets, this pair of pants has remained indestructible. And I hope they remain so for as long as I can wear them.
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