A year ago, almost to the day, I held forth on clothing, specifically the selection, acquisition, and maintenance thereof. Here we are again tonight, by what surely must be the design of fate, with the very same topic at hand. The difference is maintenance takes a back seat because I can deftly wield an iron now, and what once confounded me, indeed demanded far more patience than I cared to invest, has become palatable and often necessary.
I’ve been on the hunt for more business attire recently, particularly in the shape of sports jackets. There’s something timeless about them, and a good, reliable jacket can accompany you in a variety of situations, ably pulling double duty in both casual and semi-casual settings. Put some mileage into one, and the coat shoulders its own set of memories. The goal for this weekend is to locate another blazer, possibly two.
Normally I dislike junk mail and actively seek to remove my information from various marketing lists, but a catalog from Filson was just too compelling. I don’t think it was any one thing, and honestly I’ve minimal use for outdoors clothes. The prices were well out of my range. But between the photographs of prospectors and hunters from the early 1900s, the fact that so many items were made in the U.S., and the testimonials about the durability of such and such items, I was hooked. There were textiles mentioned that sounded alien, yet earthy: tin cloth, vegetable-tanned leather, shelter cloth, Mackinaw wool. I felt a kinship, strangely enough, ties to a bygone era when catalogs by mail were themselves small luxuries.
Responsibly and, as I would discover at 5:45 AM this morning, rather fruitlessly, I turned in at midnight sharp yesterday evening, hoping to claim a full seven-and-a-half hours of sleep. But before I hit hour six, I woke to the sound of that goddamn motorcycle from the nearby apartment complex, going through its warmup routine. Now, you might say it was better I slept early anyway, since the revving was bound to wake me, but a broken stretch of rest is just as rough as a solid, albeit truncated portion of sleep.
I understand that much like cars, motorcycles fare better with a start-up period. The engine needs to ease its way back to life, after all, and hitting the accelerator mere seconds after jamming in your key certainly doesn’t do it any favors. The fundamental question, though, is whether your start-up period requires revving the fucking thing for 10, 15 minutes, while smooth R&B pipes through those tinny speakers, and then gunning the engine like a bat out of hell.
Whenever Evel Knievel finally achieves liftoff, leaving me in that hazy purgatory between wakefulness and oblivion, my thoughts go to a dark place, and not just because the sky is typically devoid of sunlight. I’ll be honest with you. Every time I listen to that crescendoing roar, I secretly hope to hear it cut short by the sound of crunching metal and glass, followed by an encore of sirens. Terrible, right?
I chastise myself for even entertaining such imagery, rationalizing that the fellow likely has a long drive to an unpleasant job that’s needed to make ends meet, and maybe the commute is the one bright spot in his day. Everybody has their things, right? I get it. I love that feeling of motion, too, and speeding down empty thoroughfares. Then, of course, I hear the follow-up whine as he pulls onto some side street, and it’s, like, I wish you all the best. I hope you make it back safely today, preferably as a smear on the grille of a Mack DayCab.
Trying to divine the true purpose of LinkedIn is frankly an exercise in futility, and that’s after four years of faithfully logging into the site. I understand its stated purpose is to help you connect with professionals. There’s that phrase, the clarion call of social media: to connect. But whether these connections translate into anything more than a living, breathing body count, I’m not sure.
When I first started using LinkedIn, every new connection would be a fascinating story unto itself. I’d carefully browse the person’s profile, then the network, and in the process I’d cobble together a kind of corporate narrative. Then came the changes. Upload a profile photo, I was encouraged, lest my social footprint languish at only 80% completion. Shake down someone for a recommendation, if I wish to reach 85%. In order to attain 100%, heaven knows what kind of witchcraft I would’ve had to marshal.
Flash forward to today, and these arbitrary percentages have thankfully been removed. Sure, I never bothered to act on them, but all the same, a part of me would always wonder whether I was somehow incomplete as a person, simply because I didn’t reach for that headshot in GIF format. I don’t delve into other people’s profiles nearly as thoroughly, if at all, though I do make the effort to click the “Report Spam” button for invitations that really amount to cold calls.
When all is said and done, LinkedIn is a kind of modern-day Rolodex for me, a compendium of electronic mail addresses. I suspect quantity is also a benefit here, with the “body count” I mentioned earlier acting as a kind of rudimentary benchmark for prospective employers and business partners alike. That’s about it. Sometimes I’ll log into the site and be ovewhelmed by the stream of tweets or check-ins. It’s, like, if I wanted to see content from Twitter or Foursquare, I would’ve gone to those sites on my own good time. But hey! You’ve dragged them all here. Thanks, I guess. And, oh! I see so-and-so just checked into the Denny’s by the airport, before promptly being inaugurated as the Mayor thereof? Glory be. I supported his campaign from the start.