It’s a risky business, dressing myself.
Naked, I am least exposed.
I was built from the outside in,
swaddled early in soft fibrous love
grafted onto my raw bones in tight stitches,
so I could bear myself upright.
Now, it’s difficult.
Every morning, I find my seams have gaped.
When I walk from my bed to the toilet,
the burlesque clatter of beads dogs my steps, I leak
a trail of sequins from between my thighs,
attracting the crows.
I am turning inside out,
I can reach inside and finger
the soft wet nap of my life,
and digging deeper into my disgorged trunk,
pull a rag of lace, bitten by my bile
into delicate patterns, to hold up to the light.
My skin is nothing,
I am turning inside out.
I cannot find the dress that was my mother.
Whipcord pleated habit.
The hobbling platform boots that were my fathers’ shoulders
have lost a silver buckle.
A carnival panic rises
from the folds of my true nature
tangled at my feet, in intestinal shreds,
My skin is nothing.
I can’t get everything back inside,
and I cannot leave without it,
I will have to put it on, all of it.
My blistered heart is the pendant
I hang around my neck.
See a cute top or pair of jeans in an online pic or a magazine that you just had to have? Well, perusing through pictures in search of good clothes is a thing of the past! That’s what the fellas over at “Wrangler Europe” would have you think anyways.
In the new flash-based Wrangler website, you can not only shop by watching short movies of models sporting the most recent line, but by pushing them down, un-zipping their shirts, and tossing them around the screen.
From the homepage, you can browse through several “chapters” of a couple (fully clad in Wrangler attire) getting ready for a motorcycle ride. But the fact that you can select the models’ “looks” brings an added element of excitement that can only be matched by mix n matching your Barbie and Ken doll’s favorite summer outfits (Hey, whatever you’re into).
The Wrangler Europe website and snazzy interactive gallery can be found here: http://eu.wrangler.com/#/collection
If you dig a little deeper during your visit to the WE site (not to be confused with Women’s Entertainment), you’ll stumble upon the “Wrangler Blue Bell” page…which is where the fun really starts.
Wrangler Blue Bell: http://eu.wrangler.com/bluebell/#/collection/0
The first step is simple: unzip the confused man’s jacket as he enigmatically greets you with his dazed and “cant-decide-if-i’m-about-to-cry” stare. Click the arrow to the right and then you get to rough him up a bit! Drag him and the rest of his many “looks” to and fro, making him stumble and trip in his nicely coordinated outfit. Not sure if this will make you want to buy clothes, but it might make you want to throw around the next model you see posing outside of Abercrombie and Fitch.
I suppose these types of online interactive clothing catalogues are meant to let you see how clothes look and fit on real people in their day-to-day lives…even if they are rolling all over the floor or riding beat up Harley’s.
The last thing to see on the website is simply too weird and possibly disturbing for words. It’s their newest ad campaign for Spring/Summer 2010 titled, “We Are Animals.” But after viewing the pictures (and bleaching my eyeballs to get the weirdness out), I think the campaign should have been more appropriately titled “We Are Half-Naked Zombie Vampires With Pants.”
If anything, check it out just to gape at what kind of strange ad strategies companies are using these days just to sell a pair of blue jeans: http://eu.wrangler.com/#/weareanimals/campaign
I get asked about why I started this, and what I hoped to achieve through it. Most people assume its just about getting action, or just trying to play the odds and see if anything sticks. If you date a hundred girls, how many of them really impact you? How many of them do you really want to see again? How many can you see inside of?
A lot of this has to do with me still searching for that teenage feeling, that girl that comes out of nowhere, and knocks your socks off. As I get older, drunker, and more cynical those girls get fewer and farther between. You can meet great girls that are funny, smart, sweet, and incredibly flexible, and you’d date them because, well, you have no reason not to. I’m just trying to find my way home through all of this. There are Calypsos, sirens, Cyclopes, and suitors that you have to wade through. I knew in 100 days, a little over three months I would encounter them all, it was just a matter of where I would wind up.
One day before the hundred started, I spent it like how spent most of the following hundred: Drinking more than I should, procrastinating at work, and shooting the shit with Kara over GChat. There was nothing unremarkable. No life changing omens and signs filled my day.
In my head I convinced myself that this was going to be some life-defining voyage. I decided that I had to become something bigger than myself, part of the reason for undertaking the alias. By becoming Travis Dillinger, I could feel a sense of detachment from the whole thing. I was working towards a goal, and I may falter and slip, but I would see it through to the end. I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t fall for any of these girls, and I certainly wouldn’t go on a second date with any of them. But I knew that was something the real me would have an issue with. Travis Dillinger would be the serial dater to my serial monogamist. Travis would be a part of me, maybe even all the worst parts of me, that I birthed on the sixth of November, and I would just embrace it.
I’ve heard it said that cleaning the house naked cures anyone of their bad feelings about their bodies. I was determined to change my thoughts about my body, and if that meant cleaning curtains; sweeping and mopping; vacuuming; and dusting shelves in the buff, well it’s one of the things you gotta do. I was hoping to love every lump, bump, and dimple by the time I was done.
I was spending Thursday morning cleaning in the Big House… Wait, I think I failed to mention I’m a cleaning lady? I work for a company called, “The Pink Cleaners”. We’re those ladies that go around cleaning the houses of rich people and we usually wear these perky bubble gum pink shirts. This was a long time client so I knew no one was going to be home. My thinking was why not be a little adventurous and clean naked? Who’s going to see me, the dog?
Anyway, there was I was dusting the fireplace when I heard the back door open. I dropped the duster in surprise. Oh shoot! No one’s suppose to be home! I was trapped in the room because the only way out would take me right into the path of the person entering. Footsteps signaled that the unknown person was about to enter the room. Quick thinking made me duck behind the couch I had pulled out to vacuum behind.
I was cowering, in all my naked glory, when it dawned on me. I had dropped my clothes on the chair by the fireplace. I raised my head to see who the person was. Double damn-excuse my language-apparently the owners college age son had picked today to come home for a visit. Doesn’t he believe in staying at school and getting plastered like normal college students?! What is college teaching kids these days?
So there I am, naked as the day I was born, trapped in a room with the boss’s son, and hiding behind a couch. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. How was I going to get outta this? I’m trying to devise a scheme when he approaches the couch and precedes to push the couch against the wall.
“Ouch!” I screeched
“Hello?” He looks behind the couch and spots me crouching there. ”Aren’t you the cleaning lady?”
No, I thought, I’m the nude statue your parents bought. ”Um… Yes, I am.” Yes, I am naked cleaning lady behind your couch
He looked at me for a really long time. I was ready to scream after what felt like an hour of him looking at me. He’s in college, surely he’s seen naked girls before. The only difference was I was sober.
“You wanna hand me my clothes.” I was hoping my speaking would snap him out of his too close observation. My expression was less than friendly at that moment. I’m pretty sure my face rivaled thunderclouds for being ominous and stormy.
“Sure, but you have to tell me why you’re naked first.” He was laughing now
What the heck do I tell him? I was cleaning his parent’s house naked because I wanted to be more comfortable with my body? That somehow doesn’t sound as good.
“I… I… Got cleaning solution all down my clothes and was going to change when you walked in.” That sounded good enough to me.
He walked to the chair and retrieved my clothes. Right as I was thought he was going to hand them back, he unfolds them and looks them over. He cocks an eyebrow in my direction. Ok, so he didn’t believe me, but that was all he was getting today.
“Look, just give me my clothes so I can finish cleaning.” I could see why his social life was lacking if this is how he treated naked girls he ran into.
He handed my clothes to me and laughed when I snatched them out of his hands. He stood there with his arms crossed and waited for me to stand up.
“Do you mind?!” My voice had gone from scared to angry in minutes.
He turned his back and I wished I could chuck something at his head. I seem to get myself in messes like this more often than not. Sigh.
“I’m going to ask you a favor, don’t tell your parents about this and I’ll owe you one.”
“Oh, I wasn’t planning on telling my parents, but I’ll be happy to have you owe me a favor.” His smile scared me more him catching me naked. This twerp was going to con me into something, I could feel it, but what choice did I have? This was my best client. A cleaning lady’s gotta do what a cleaning lady’s gotta do.
He was still smiling as he walked out of the room. I finished cleaning, completely clothed and left at the end of the day.
I haven’t heard from him yet, but I wait for it to come. I also gave up cleaning naked, there’s something about getting caught once that makes you look for other ways to like yourself. I’m concentrating my efforts on more vacations and massages, that’s the best plan I’ve had in a long time.
