Yesterday, it was time for me to buy some new jeans. The threadbare spots on the old ones are just about to segway into holes around my ass and crotch (like yours don’t). Of course, this sucks, as spending money on clothes blows chunks. You can’t snort them, eat them or sleep with them so what the hell is the point, you know? Buying jeans is especially sucky, as the jeans you are wearing have to be designed by someone who has a doctorate in the science of cutting thread in a way that doesn’t make you look like a dated imbecile. Thrift storing for jeans is tricky business. You have to really love shopping to make it worth your while, going through thousands of old jeans until you find the perfect pair of old jeans whose retro cut (but only retro in the right way) has the perfect jauntiness to match your physical build, blah blah blah... I’m neither a woman or a homosexual, so I cannot be bothered with this. If you don’t want to look like you’ve been living under a rock for the past fifteen years, you really don’t have any other choice but to go to the great big hated San Francisco jeans conglomerate. They have an entire team of thread cutting scientists whose job it is to know what cuts don’t look retarded in any given year.

So I went to this evil store, picked out the jeans, followed the clerk who pranced me to the dressing rooms and tried some new ones for size. Now if there is a specific rule that defines the cut of men’s jeans, it’s that whatever happened to women’s jeans fashions five years prior will invariably be followed in the men’s variant. I’ve grown accustomed to the slightly flared legs, that had occurred by the last time I put myself through this hell three years ago. Adding two inches to the length of the legs, so that I’m walking on the backs is no problem. That part I can handle on my own. Of course, this is all probably terribly dated; but I’m not twenty, or gay or a woman so I really don’t care. My goal is to not stick out or look like an idiot for a thirty-three year old man living in an urban environment.

What I was not prepared for was that the belt line has moved so far south. On every pair that I tried on, if they had taken one more inch off the belt line, the stem of my penis would have been exposed.

Now, I’m a skinny guy. Some would even say scrawny. Scratch that. All would say scrawny. I’m not going to complain about this. Listening to an adult complain about being skinny would be like listening to an adult complain about having low cholesterol. All that would accomplish would be to cause 80% of the people reading this to want to kill me in my sleep. So you’re getting a little chunky with age? I’m balding. We all have our crosses to bear. I’m only mentioning this to point out that I have not had anything resembling an ass since high school. I have a slate slab with two legs attached. When I turned around to look at my ass for the first time in three years, I was shocked to see that the new jeans actually made my rear look concave, as though I had suffered some horrendous battle wound while running away from the enemy at the Battle of the Bulge... like my Great Uncle Dodey. I’m not a veteran, so I can’t blame German grenade shrapnel like he could. For me, it is my genetics and the jeans that are at fault. I had brought several pairs into the dressing room with me, so I tried them all. One after another, the new cut gave me Black Hole Butt. I swear, the damned thing was sucking in light and warping time.

Frustrated, I decided to give up and put on the threadbare pair I had worn to the store. Before leaving the dressing room, I checked out my ass in the old jeans. Well, what do you know? It wasn’t the jeans at all. In the past three years, my ass has gone from being nonexistent to actually being in the negative numbers.

THAT’S interesting.

I said “eh, what the fuck?,” and bought a couple of pair. I considered eating 2 pounds of home fries every morning to reverse this unsettling trend, but being male, it probably wouldn’t work and would just give me a belly instead. And nothing says sexy like a boney-assed waif-man with a big belly.

If you’re driving around Mt. Vernon and see an ass sucking in light, sound and small planetary objects under a low belt line, honk and say hello. Even if you’re far away, the sound of the horn should drift in my direction. You might want to keep your distance, though.