Earlier tonight we drove out to the LA Count Fair, which is one of my all-time favorite events.
While walking up and down, here and there, I found myself behind a kid whose pants were practically dragging down to his shoes. They were ludicrously big and ludicrously low, and I thought to myself, “Why the hell would anyone do that? It just makes no sense.”
Then, a few minutes ago, I stumbled upon the above photograph. It’s me, in 1999, on my backpacking journey through Italy and Malta. I’m on a boat, wearing (inexplicably) a Brock Huard Washington Huskies jersey and (even more inexplicably) some sort of tattered T-shirt wrapped around my head.
I’d love to pretend the tattered T-shirt was some sort of joke. Perhaps my effort at Halloween on a boat. But, eh, it wasn’t.
You see, back in the summer of 1999, I thought this looked cool. I don’t recall why. Maybe I was heavily into pirates. Or tattered T-shirts. Maybe I thought it reduced the size of my watermelon-like forehead. Maybe some ballplayer wore a tattered T-shirt around his skull during BP. Whatever the case, I can’t imagine what others thought, seeing some guy in his 20s looking like … well … like that.
Really, though, it’s an important point for people as they age. It’s easy to look at younger folk and think, “What the hell is that?” But we, too, had folks gazing our way and thinking, “What the hell is that?” We’ve all been there—yet, for some reason, we ultimately settle into a new age bracket and forget our own shortcomings and oddities.
So, please, feel free to wear your pants as low as possible.
Love, The 1999 Pirate
