I'll wear a jean

People ask about the cargo pants -- about the insistence on cargo pants. Well, they're practical, for one. I can carry twice as much as a person wearing so-called "regular" pants. And that's being conservative, since the cargo pockets themselves are much deeper than a regular pocket, so I bet if you really measured it out, I'm carrying three or four times as much. When you think about it that way, it's actually wearing non-cargo pants that comes to seem like a stupid decision, speaking strictly from a point-of-view of which pants have the best carrying capacity.

And it's not just for show, I use that capacity, too. I'll fill my pockets up with interesting bits of trash I find walking around, trash that I think I could maybe use later. Or I'll fill them with nuts to throw at any critters that come too close to me. Sometimes I'll dip the nuts in something like detergent powder, to give the critters an unpleasant little surprise, like they think they're getting a delicious snack, but then they sniff their paws and they're all of a sudden covered in poison, or soap, anyway. But sometimes I'll just give them nuts not dipped in anything, and they're happy about that.

My sister, who worries, got me a pair of jeans last Christmas. Now, I'll wear a jean, when all my cargo pants are in the wash or whatever, I'll wear a carpenter jean with a little hammer loop, not that I carry a hammer generally, but it's nice to have the option. But this jean didn't have a loop or any kind of adornment, it was just, jean. And I did give them a try, for her sake, but they weren't right. I felt absurd, I felt vain. Like, what are these legs for? Not for carrying nuts or trash around, but I'm just, like, presenting them, like, thrusting them into the world, like, look at these legs, aren't they dainty, aren't they pretty? Look at how long and sleek and impractical they are. Aren't I a pretty boy? I tried to go places with them and I'd just, sweat all over and shake, I'd imagine people thinking, what's this guy trying to get away with? Who does he think he is? The kind of guy who wastes a whole pant, pisses away all that carrying capacity, because he's so in love with his leg, qua leg? So what I did was, I made a couple sacks out of some burlap I'd found, and sewed them to the side of the jeans, roughly where cargo pockets would be. And they're not pretty, because I can't sew and I get these dizzy spells that make it difficult to cut straight, but they carry. They carry really well, actually.

That seems right. It even seems right that the sacks are uneven and poorly cut. It answers the question: why are you wearing those jeans? It's not, oh, to show off my prissy, dainty legs. I'm wearing them, obviously, because I need to carry stuff around in these sacks. It answers the question so well that no one has to ask it.

I don't know how they do it, cargo pants, and jeans with sacks sewn onto them, make me feel like no one can see me, even when I'm the only one anywhere wearing them.