THE FALL GUY

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-24-24)

     Every fall when I walk outside the house I smell that smell in the air, and I panic for a fleeting moment. It's the smell of overdue homework, of menacing teachers, of disappointed parents. Even after all these years I still feel a twinge of guilt for having made teachers work so hard for such meager results. 

     To my Dad, good grades meant a smooth four years of college, which meant an on-time graduation, resulting in potentially one less kid cluttering up the house. When you have six children, churning out college graduates is like an assembly line, and I was threatening to hold up the works like Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory.

     Teachers told my parents that I wasn't applying myself. But certainly neither of us would have benefitted by a more liberal application of me. They told me I was a smart-ass, correctly identifying the most intelligent part of myself. They would call my parents in for a conference, and I can only imagine how it went: "Your son is not taking his work seriously," the teacher would say. "Yes, we notice the same thing at home- he does his chores un-seriously." "He's becoming a disruption in class." "There too? He's a disruption around the house also." "At school, he complains about his homework." "Oh really? At home, he complains about his schoolwork." "Well, I'm glad we had this chat, it seems like we're in total agreement."

     My parents, teachers, guidance counselors, all said the same thing in different ways: I was a slacker not living up to my potential. I told them that they couldn't be more wrong, because they had vastly overestimated my potential. So they sent me off to a BOCES vocational testing facility, where I undertook a barrage of tests meant to derive suggestions as to what career path I might undertake, based on my intelligence and interests. I was expecting the results to show that I was best suited to become whatever the opposite of rocket scientist is. I definitely was not expecting the outcome I got, a recommendation of "flower arranger" (I'm not kidding about this). To this day, whenever I see an arrangement of flowers, I think, "Those were probably arranged by someone who did not apply themself in math class."

     I'm not sure where it started to go wrong, since I began as a gifted student. Excelling in blocks, coloring and the alphabet, my academic career was off to a rousing start. In middle school I was a promising pupil, but by high school nobody believed my promises anymore.

     It's too late now, but if I had studied harder in science and mathematics, perhaps I could have become part of the team that developed artificial intelligence. I would have had the most to gain from any intelligence that didn't have to come from me. But I am conceptually retarded in math. I couldn't put two and two together, and what if they don't even want to be together? People assume that traffic and weather want to be together, and both of them keep getting worse, so look how that turned out.

     Finally, just when it seemed like my academic career would come to a grinding halt in the 12th grade, I figured out the key to writing a credible term paper. All this time I had focused on finding a clear-sighted, intelligent thesis and supporting it with dumb analysis. After my moment of awakening, I realized that a ridiculous, far-fetched premise would be much easier to prop up with my fatuous arguments, and I blossomed as an scholar, getting accepted to one of the premier communications schools in the country.

     In college as a serious student, I prepared myself for the first job in my 44-year career at the most famous of the broadcast networks in the world: watching television for eight hours a day. There was never a job more suited to my talents and training. I understood that eventually I would marry an intelligent wife and let her do the thinking.

     And that has worked out spectacularly. My wife is well-read, quick-witted and wise. She provides me with half of an insightful conversation in many subjects. I'm supposed to supply the other half. For my part I like to think of myself as the "yang" to her "yin," a perfect counterpart who provides what she might be lacking at the time: a steady barrage of one-liners during sensitive parts of a movie (which in my defense are the boring parts). 

     And yet, that smell of fall still has the same effect now as it did then, and with a fresh jolt of anxiety I realize why it's so strong: I never handed in my final high school term paper. If my teacher gets a hold of me now, he's going to throttle me within an inch of his life, because he must be really old by now. I bolt back inside the house where the only smell in the air is the cat box, and dealing with that is long overdue also.

A FITTING TRIBUTE

 

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-10-24)

     This is how I shop for clothes: I bought six pairs of Lee jeans from Amazon, 34 waist, 34 length. Can you believe that after all these years I'm still a 34-inch waist? Okay, 35. 36, but that's my final offer. How do I keep my slim waistline? By tightening my belt with a chain wrench before zipping up my pants. The waist is a terrible thing to mind.  

     The truth is that I don't know much about how to shop for clothing. Manufacturers should realize that most guys don't put a lot of thought into it. They should just decide what we want, produce it, send it to us based on the sizes we tell them (such as, "oh, pretty normal-size I guess," or "just round it off to the nearest whole number"), ship it to us, debit our bank accounts and leave us completely out of the process.

     And do it periodically, because guys never throw out clothing. I have a pair of jeans that has a rip above the knee that's eventually going to go all the way around, and then I'll have to decide if there's such a thing as half a pair of shorts. 

     I ignore terms like "the rise" when shopping for pants, because it sounds like something that's none of my business. "Inseam" I guess is pretty self-explanatory, but I'd like to be able to measure my pants without turning them inside-out. I wear my jeans pretty long, in case I have cowboy boots on, but when I wear sneakers the cuffs scrape along the ground, picking up all kinds of things that may later be introduced as evidence.

     I haven't bought any shirts for a long time, because shirts are hard. Xtra-Large usually means tall and portly, whereas I am not extra-tall but I am extra-whimsical, and that's a very hard size to fit. Tee shirts aren't much easier. If I buy a Large it's sometimes too small. If I buy an Xtra-Large it's usually too large. If I buy a Medium, sometimes it's TOO medium.

     It's even worse for women, where the sizing isn't based on empirical measures, such as inches, but on an inscrutable foundation of magical premises, the most important of which being that no woman is satisfied with her actual size. EVER. So clothes-makers jump through hoops trying to find phrasing that dances around the reality of the facts. When clothing designers coined the term "plus size," they were trying to be sensitive to the idea that it's sometimes hard to lose weight. "Plus size" sounds like an asset: there's just more to love. "Multiplication size," even if often more accurate, would not service this purpose. "Petite" is an honorific that makes an appealing term for women who can't reach any of the kitchen cabinets. Some "petites" are so petite that they end up in the "juniors" department, wearing styles that their Moms wouldn't let them out of the house wearing, except that THEY'RE the Moms now. Shopping in the "Misses" Department at your age tells you up front that you're way off the mark. 

     Confounding it all are the sizes themselves. The numbers are often inconsistent between manufacturers, not to mention internationally. You can still try to force reason upon the issue. To accurately determine your waist, wrap the tape measure around the narrowest part of your torso, just above your belly button. The tape should be snug but not tight. Okay, ease up a bit, you're turning blue. You seem to have keeled over. Let's move on. Numerical sizing for women is supposed to take into account her proportions, and provide a tailored fit, taking into account her various feminine attributes. If, as she ages, there is an  inverse proportion, complicated math may be involved. "Can you believe that after all these years I STILL wear a size zero?!" "Wow, that's  the same size as before you were born!" 

    Some sizes run small. Well, if they were actual inches they'd have no choice but to run in place right where they were. Maybe you want something with a "fuller cut?" Don't overfill it or you might spill something. Maybe you'd like something "curvy" and "off-shoulder?" If so, the road I live on might be perfect for you.

     I've gone shopping with my wife, and it's a very frustrating experience. She wanders from one rack to the next, and picks up each sleeve and rubs it and goes "Hmmm." Women have a special way of divining whether a garment fits/ is the right price/ looks good on her just by touching it once, whereas it might take her several years to figure out that her boyfriend doesn't fit at all.

     I just thought of THE PERFECT THING for you! It's asymmetrical, bat-wing, boat-neck, box-pleated, patch-pocket, notch-collar, puff-sleeved, adjustable-suspension, automatic-transaxle and self-leveling, and you can drive it off the lot today with only 20 percent down! The bottom line, which should fall somewhere near your bottom, is this: If you dress well, and everything fits, you may finally be taken seriously at work. And as a humor writer, that's the last thing I need.