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Navy Blah

July 26, 2013, 9:03 am
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My closet is full of fuzzy. You know—my sartorial contrivances that for the most part successfully made the breach from idea to existence in good form. 
I love pattern and texture and consistent with my Pee Dee roots, I’ll always like a little smidge of trashy thrown in too. Exhibit A for this “look at me, look at me” spore that still inhabits my essence is this redneck-ass pair of honky-tonk trailer trash drunk meets the Regatta britches I bought in Charleston the other week. It was half price time at M.Dumas, the only thing left on King Street in Charleston worth visiting (unless you wanna gander for a moment in that museum known as Ben Silver) but oh no…I had to pop for something full-price. That something being these Vineyard Vines please make fun of me thangs. Shut up. Shut the ___ up.
And this is how bad it’s gotten betwixt me and Ms. LFG. I waited till she was back in the room at the Mills House before I slipped down to Dumas and made the purchase. To this day she knows not that they exist since I sneaked ‘em in my travel bag and spirited them back home sub damn rosa. Kinda like the Underground Railroad for shit one ought not to be buying in the first place. Remember...she forbid me to wear my F. Todd Howell Hog Farmer Coffman Specials depicted above. Shut up I already said. 
I’m her father. She respects me and loves me and even though she only grunts at me now, the grunts are mine. All y’all  told me that the grunts are pretty much the only thing I’m gonna get for the next five years and if LFG saw these britches; I do believe amidst her somewhat sequestered feelings for me, she would thereafter cut me off from even the all too infrequent huffs and eye-rolls. It ain’t worth it.
But amidst all my color and pattern craziness, some kinda default anti-GTH override seems to be more consistent than the flurry of fuzziness that busts out from time to time. What is this default override of which I speak? Blue jackets and tan trousers. Case in point you axk for? My zillion pairs of tan or close to tan linen and cotton/silk trousers that I wear the hell out of all summer long. Did I need another pair? 
I thought so and the flat front, beltless, frog mouth cowboy pocketed pair seen here would be my latest contrivance. I still ain’t gonna tell you the source. It’s my dirty little secret but just suffice it to say that my spendthrift self ain’t gonna let Uncle Flusser or Miracle Mark Rykken make me no bespokeydoke britches at seven hundred a go. 
These are remarkably less...price-wise and as far as the need for quality and durability, these are rigorous enough. And tasty, tasty, tasty… ‘specially after we throwed a two-inch cuff on their south ends. Then again anything swathing my still in-shape temple of sexiness is gonna be tasty, tasty, tasty. Speak up.
And jackets? I wear a solid blue one seventy-five percent of the time. Certainly I love other things color and pattern wise and Miracle Mark Rykken at Paul Stuart has a lovely summer jacket in the works for me right now. It’s a great gaggle of pattern and color—with hacking flaps on it to make it just fuzzier enough.
But Miracle Mark also has for me in tandem with that jacket, another, you guessed it, blue one. But oh, it's different. Three-Two Roll--Peaked Lapels--Double Vented of course but the game changer on this one?...Hacking Pockets including ticket. Now that's different, no?
Blue jackets prevail…yet I’ve got those windowpane and tweedy things in my closet that I’m so crazy about and I’ve got a remarkable Russell Plaid jacket for winter that’s sitting right now on Savile Row awaiting my first fitting. It's a different shade than the one above and I’m gonna remain cagey and coy regarding who’s making it for me till I write a story about the jacket and the cutter this Fall. But for now I will say that he is the most imaginative cutter on the Row today…imaginative without being all tarted up like the current stewards of Huntsman's legacy. Damn. When I think that something’s too fuzzy or tarty then it probably is.
My interest in the Russell plaid was very precise. I didn’t want the common version infrequently offered in trousers and jackets off the peg. The standard version is rather brown with a light cream background that makes the already geometrically crisp Russell appear even more structured and harsh. There’s another version...above...that’s slightly greener and creamier and I’m just gonna tell you right now that it will be the bomb. Or as Zbigniew Brzezinski used to pronounce it…“bom-buh.” Now I’ve yet to see my Russell jacket and have deliberately not asked to see photos of it because I want my first sighting to be in situ. I missed my first fitting in New York when my mama blew up but one of my best buddies saw it. Here’s what he said…

“…and after we'd chatted a bit about this and that and him and her, he showed me a lovely exclusive swatch of brown checked tweed -- of which he had only enough for one or two suits -- and it was right down my street. So I said yes. Then he casually asked me if I wanted to see your jacket. Just as casually I said yes, and he brought it out: I was knocked completely base over apex; the antique Russell plaid made up beautifully. So beautifully in fact that I cancelled my original choice of the brown check and told him to make me up the Russell.”
You’ll learn who this fella is that’s aped my Russell when I write the story. Let me just tell you for now that I’ve never been prouder to have someone of his taste level be inspired by something that I contrived. Maybe he can make some headway with my little grunter, LFG.
Oh, and before we get back to blue jackets, the swatch(es) above has been bothering me for six months. I ran across it when I was seeking out the just-right version of the Russell plaid and I can’t get over it. Kinda like the carpincho hide that I’ve been obsessing over courtesy of those clever Cleverley boys. I thought I had it washed outta my noggin after seeing a garish, hip-hop pimp ass carpincho shoe in green. It was absurd enough to scare even my fuzzy redneck rump to death but somehow the carpincho spore has embedded itself once again. Be quiet. I’m not sure which of the two colorways above will prevail. Do you have an opinion?
My mostly navy…blue jacket penchant has always manifested with gold buttons….blazer style. Puerto Rykken and Alan Flussfluss made my blue linen jacket years ago and just assumed that I’d want horn buttons on it and sent it accordingly. And I accordingly called them and requested a set of gold buttons as soon as it arrived. I think it goes back to my college days when every KA wore a navy blazer with gold buttons. All the damn time.
Here I am years ago dancing with a little stunner on the deck of the Disney Cruise-r. Linen Flusser blazer and a dance partner who at that time still thought I was the Cat Daddy. 
Photo stolen once again--from Ivy Style. Shut up.
But times change and some proclivities adjust accordingly. The anti-fuzziness…the duende…the subtle confidence manifest in this man’s navy jacket caught me many months ago when we were having lunch in Gotham. G. the Bruce Boyer was rocking a navy double breasted jacket in a way that made me feel childish about my peacockery. And I’ve had that jacket on my mind ever since.
Photo stolen from Rose Callahan...Order your copy of I Am Dandy today. If not, I'll cut you.
The understated subtlety reminded me of those classic dressers who had very nice clothes but very standard things regarding color and cut. Bill Blass and Bobby Short come to mind. Both when not in formal attire, were usually seen in gray or blue clothes. Superbly cut and minimally accessorized. Could I ever become a student of such elegant restraint?   
I don’t know but what I do know is that I wanted to try such a jacket yet I had no budget for it. Rykken and Savile Row nicked my entire 2013 bespoke budget. So where might I turn for such an experiment and do so for less money? Seems like one thing that’s consistent in this story is my insistence on not uncloaking my sources. To that end, I’ll keep this one under wraps too—at least for now. The first fitting was quite good and I’ll do a write up on the jacket once I get it back after just a few needed tweaks.
It’s a hopsack but not one of those stiff feeling cheapies. Rather nice hand for the money and my hunch is that it’ll end up being a go-to staple. We’ll see how long I last before I tart it up with gold buttons. Yes by the way--that is a machine made button hole. I'm slumming in MTM land instead of bespoke. Most of you mugwumps don't even know the difference so leave me alone and I mean it. And before one of you Style Forum turds leaves an anonymous of course, message about the cheap plastic buttons...they are the try on buttons. Nicer ones will replace the scrimmage set.
Oh, and I couldn’t not do something to make it just a little bit pimpish. The lining is quintessential South Carolina Horry County Pee Dee White Trash. All to be damned. Inspired by G. the Bruce. Tarted up by D. the G.
Duplicates. After the Rykken one rolls in and the G. the Bruce inspired one makes way I'll be down to only six blue jackets.
Final point regarding owning duplicates of the same thing. If you know you've got backup, you're less likely to worry about the consequences of capricious behavior that might damage your goods. Case in point regarding my deportment is reflected here. Amidst that clothing carnage there's a navy blazer. This was a few summers ago when I got a craving flung on me and peeled down right then and there--outside. Can't recall now who exactly was the motivator but I'm sure we had a big time. And for you newbies who haven't read about my other antics, the above is nothing. I've been known to set my damn self on fire. Read here if you don't believe me. Now back to the pile of clothes in the photo...had I been really worried about my clothes getting soiled or had I been wearing a jacket made of some delicate dupioni or a fragile fresco...I'd a probably thought twice and then...done the same damn thing. 
Onward. Home from a wild week that began in Jacksonville and ended in the northern burbs of Chicago…flying with the summer vacation travel rookies. One copes.  
And what'll help me cope this weekend will be some Honky Tonk Healin'. Listen to my boy David Ball, a fellow South Carolina redneck, as he extols the virtues of the Honky Tonk Healin' process.

And one more thing…my mama—the one that was supposed to die last March—walked the other day. Six steps—with a physical therapist on each arm—but still.

ADG the Second One



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I'll Be Back

August 13, 2013, 4:18 am
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I'm just not sure when. Perhaps another few days. I'm flat out covered up with moving and rental property prep and work and a quaint little, well landscaped cottage for my LFG and... all things great.
Till I return, take a look at my buddy Paul's killer TR-6. Nobody in the world is nicer than Paul and nobody is more deserving of such a toy.

Onward

ADG...thank God there's only been...II
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Saturday Morning Monk Straps

August 28, 2013, 9:32 am
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I’ve tried to write a thoughtful story or two over the last three weeks but I just don’t have the bandwidth to do it. LFG, my work, my mom, my Old Town property rehab and my Bethesda move have me just snowed under like I’ve not been in a decade. I remain mindful though, that the stress and the overload are mostly due to good things.

Here’s an example of an honorable effort from three damn Saturdays ago. I never got back to it but I figured that I’ll now just toss the scrap of it out here for y’all to stare at…

Saturday Morning Monk Straps…and other assorted things.
Last year's half-price Oundles
LFG remains asleep in a rather contradictory way so I’ve got a moment to post some randomness. I’ll explain the contradictory sleeping thing later but for now let’s talk monk straps  After all, this blog thing used to be about shoes and stuff. The half-price Alfred Sargent monks from Leffot were, just like my Edward Green suede Oundles from last year’s sale, simply too good to pass up.
Color? Not exactly what I would have selected at full price but with a little bit of ADG fuzzy work, I had ‘em just right in no time. And methinks it’s good that for one rare instance, I didn’t buy another pair of suede shoes.
I’ve never owned a pair of A.S. shoddings but I’m inclined to think that they are gonna be a great value for the half-price pick up. Ok…on to LFG’s contradictory sleep…
Contradictory in that her adolescence is manifesting that transitional twain from little girl to young lady. So her bantam body is amidst a metabolic agenda that has her sleeping till almost noon some days. Surely this isn't news to any of you who’ve raised teenagers but all of this is a new thing for me to watch—to shepherd. So where’s the contradiction? Remnants of her little girl innocence remain, thank goodness. Evidence of this is that she remains asleep at this late morning hour…but in my bed…having asked sometime in the night if she could come in. My not so little, little girl…the one who with respect and kindness only grunts at me these days…needed the comfort of her daddy.
I’m transitioning to Bethesda with the realization that my gal may still only offer me the monosyllabic whatever amidst a predictable eye-rolling eighth grader grunt. Proxemics doesn’t mitigate such things. But I’ll only have to drive five minutes to harvest my paucities.
Onward. Repairing drywall and other stuff.


ADG II 
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Last Days of Linen

September 6, 2013, 6:20 am
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…and Seersucker too while we’re at it.
I’m known and prone to bend break the rules and and amidst these remaining shards of  post-Labor Day heat, I’ll be extending my use of linen till probably Halloween. Your Seersucker (yes, I capitalize Seersucker. I’m from the South. South and Seersucker deserve to be capitalized and I don’t have to explain it. Shut up.) however, must now be gone. At least around these parts.

I have a buddy in South Carolina—we coulda been blood brothers…our proclivities-quirks and other idiodamnsyncrasies are almost identical…kinda like me and LFG’s Uncle Toad…butcept I still have abs and those guys don’t—who uses the “85 Degree Rule” and it makes sense for South Carolina. According to my Sandlapper cousin, it makes no difference what month it happens to be, if it’s 85 degrees, everything in the closet, including Seersucker remains fair game. I’ll go with that—but only in climes like the Carolinas or that tropical place where I lived for a couple of years—New Orleans. (The punctuation in this paragraph has the makings for a Goat Rodeo. Shut up.)
My cadet blue linen togs barely arrived in time for any 2013 use but they managed to eke their way to me a week ago. And I’m still all about frog mouth-top pockets and flat fronts on my casual trousers. I don’t wear navy blue trousers. They just don’t seem to go with any of my jackets and even if they did, the stark contrast is too much for me. So the cadet blues offered an alternative to a twelfth pair of tan linen trousers and enough contrast that I can pull these off with a navy blazer.
Figured I’d get ‘em in Seersucker while I was at it. And for winter 2013? Light gray flannel—top pockets—flat front—BUT with belt loops. I need a canvas from which my Orange Fuzzy Coffman’s Crocodile belt will preen. You laugh now. You’ll be jonesin’ later. Be quiet.
Two inch cuffs, too…and a dress extension front closure on flat fronts. These are enough of a folly, design-wise, to keep me interested and others curious. If only I could manage that in my romantic endeavors. Where’s that neighbor lady this morning. I've suddenly got a cravin’ flung on me.
My other quirky-fuzzy trouser experiment over these recent years was thanks to Bookster (R.I.P.) and my ideation of a flat-front, dress extension, split back—fishtail waistband tog—reminiscent of cavalry officer trews. Dark green corduroy above.
Got ‘em in grey flannel, Seafield tweed, and tan linen too.I wonder if Bookster will rise again. Anybody know?
Ok, I digress…back to linen and seersucker. Of all my potential follies in 2013, my M. Dumas—Vineyard Vines seersucker jeans…aren’t one of ‘em. Home run. Period. And for some crazy reason, I can make ‘em work. Shut up.
Light as a feather yet substantial enough to keep all the bits secure when going commando. Seersucker Commando. Now that’s something.
Since I’m down to writing two stories a month, let me really digress and offer an update on my move and LFG and everything else. I drug dragged  my feet for months on end regarding pulling the trigger on a place in Bethesda. I’ve got great excuses but they are excuses nonetheless. One of my business partners had a second heart surgery in January so we were all doing extra duty, my mother’s high drama health saga began in March and has kept me pretty much consumed during every bit of free time I’ve had to break away and go to South Carolina and assist. But I promised LFG that I’d be in Bethesda when the new school year started—and I barely made the deadline.
And when she and I found this quaint little cottage we both knew that this would be a great nest for me/us. As I explained to her; even though I’d only be five minutes away, I would still be spending more time in my Bethesda nest without her than not. Therefore it was crucial that the place felt right and good for me. I signed a two-year lease on this house and my hope is that I’ll be inclined to stay here till LFG graduates from high school.
It’s been humbling to learn how much sh_t one person can accumulate in ten years. My marriage ended a decade ago and I’ve happily added more books and toy soldiers and caricatures and clothes and other irreleventia to my holdings during this epoch. And I swear that I’ve given tons of stuff to Goodwill and have shed at least two hundred books.
But this move has shed light on the fact that I’m a borderline hoarder. Tasty hoards but hoards none the damn less. And to exacerbate the issue I closed my office in Old Town and now all of the caricatures and other goodies that swathed those walls are here in Bethesda too. It’s all good but I’ve gotta have a purge of sorts rather soon.
So it is all good, right? You bet. Moving is one of the top stressors in life…right up there with divorce, marriage, loss of a loved one etc. But some stress can be good and I’d define this move as positive tension. I’m going to be very happy here and can even co-parent the pooch now. However.
The renovation of my Old Town digs is another story. I’m on the record admitting that I’m a terrible investor but my saving grace has been the rental properties that I’ve owned in Old Town. I moved back into one when I divorced and began to half-ass evolve it into my own little Anglophilic Redneck Ass Deliverance Meets Sir John Soan with a splash of Hollister Hovey while babysitting Honey Boo Boo  pad.
And unbeknownst to me, it was a hot mess when I began to create the punch list of stuff that needed to be done to revert it back to the updated neutrality that rental properties need to convey. To say that I bit off more than I could chew…to say that there have been moments when I was teetering on being in over my head is an understatement.
But when the quotes started to roll in I declared that I could save ten grand by handling everything myself. And I will ultimately save the ten grand but methinks I’ve at least vanquished two of my years. I’ve been working twelve-hour backbreaking days and until yesterday, I couldn’t see that I’d made any progress. 
Never say never…but I’m pretty sure the next time around I’ll at least hire someone to do a few of the more aggravating jobs.
Aggravating? Ten years’ worth of half-ass do it yourself endeavors creates a pile of onerous revisions and I wasn’t gonna let someone else discover my previous “hell, it looks good enough for me” shortcomings while I was standing there. 
Drywall that came off in chunks when I removed prefab wainscoting…chair rail moulding nails that hadn’t been properly countersunk with a nail punch and had three different coats of paint slopped on them…

Crown moulding that needed recaulking but only after the old, cheap silicone caulk had been stripped. Bathroom fixtures, carpet and appliances that were installed in 1989. Damn.
And dark colors? Barney Purple LFG bedroom with Day-Glo orange outlet covers and lime green doors? I’ve used ten gallons of primer on one door. Never. Again.
Here's the Barney Purple bedroom after a zillion hours of .....
I did remove and replace the door facing with LFG's measurements on it.
And the new appliances are installed in the kitchen but I still can't muster the juice to erase LFG's chalk scribbles just yet. And no, I won't have the drywall cut out and replaced. I just need to suck it up and...erase it.
Bold striped walls with black and white photos in the half-bath. Brilliant, right?
I'll have all of that particular brilliance vanquished this weekend.
Ok. I’m gonna close this drivel and roll the refuse carts to the street. I live in the suburbs now and that’s what we do. And since I'm still getting to know my neighbors and first impressions are so important, I'm gettin' dolled up in linen before I step out.

Onward. With Aleve and Icy Hot--I've got Paint Roller Elbow.


ADG II--Bethesda
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Alan Flusser and My Mama

September 18, 2013, 4:49 pm
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Any port in a storm, right? You know what I’m talking about. How many times have you been trapped during a family visit and enthusiastically volunteered to…run to the store…drop off something at the post office…you know…anything and I mean anything…just to get out of the house and feel the fresh winds of freedom on your face?  Even if it’s for only fifteen minutes.

I love my mama in the way that—well—I was about to say in the way that only Southern boys love their mamas but it ain’t true. All boys can love their mamas this way if they so choose. And I do love my mom. But I’m back home caring for my mom this week and I’m in that emotional and humbling crucible again. The one that’s been shilly-shallying between a rolling boil cauldron and a slow-cook ennui crock-pot since March. We aren't special and I'm not looking for sympathy. But I can say unequivocally that it's hell--with brief, transient rays of hope. I think.
So when I found a thirty minute reprieve day before yesterday I was on it like a rat on a damn Cheeto. Drug store for various mama supplies and since Stein Mart was a 3-wood away, I spent my extry time there.
The Alan Flusser—Stein Mart relationship goes back probably fifty-plus years ago. Alan Flusser and Jay Stein were sleep-away camp mates during their formative years and have remained close ever since. I always get a kick out of seeing Alan’s Stein Mart thumbprint here in Florence, S.C. There’s not much of a Stein Mart presence in the D.C. area so I don’t get to see this stuff all the time.
Every time I'm there I get the urge to stop some random Stein Mart shopper and say “look…see that guy Flusser and all of these clothes with his name on 'em?...well he’s in my speed dial…look…here it is if you don’t believe me…hit the button and we’ll call him if you really don’t believe me.” And it would really be a kick if I’d wear a pair of Alan’s hand me down bespokeydoke shoes and take one of them off in Stein Mart and show it to the poor stranger who I’ve buffaloed into hearing my Flusser caca and tell him that story. Butcept I don’t wear those kinda shoes in Florence, S.C. People...even if they’ve known you their whole-entire complete life...will whip your ass for wearing such things around here. Belgians are a huge risk and that’s where I draw the line. My mama even looks at those kinda cockeyed.
So I walk into Stein Mart and the Flusser goods are preening front and center. Alan’s style tweaks on these mass produced, mid-tier quality goods are always there. It’s consistently there in color and pattern and a design treatment or two. But within reason…mind you…there are fuzz limits since...these goods are made…over “there”.
But this season, the Flusser Stein Mart goods are off the hook tasty. Blown away might be a bit too strong but it's close. I’m just telling you…the look for the money index strongly favors pouncing on some of this if you live near a Stein Mart. The first thing that caught me was the less than seventy-five dollars corduroy blazers. Oh, and kiss my a_s in advance for those of you who are gonna say... “yeah but it’s gonna look like crap in a year”. Well guess what mister quality man…not everyone can afford to go to Macy’s…where you...you Dockers wearin, beer bellied wad of adipose gets swathed. Lordy I’ve got anger issues.
I’d a snapped a few more pictures…including the double vents and the contrasting felt collar treatment on one of the corduroy jackets but I’d taken so many already that I figgered Hoyt or Darnell…you know…the Stein MartMinions would collar me any minute. Plus my shore leave was about to expire and I had to get back home.
And this season’s goods include a Tattersal shirt that equals the Cordings look at much less the tariff. Cordings aesthetics parity in Florence, South Carolina. Damn.
The colors and patterns are extry rich and there are brushed cotton trousers to complement the four corduroy jacket color choices.
I’m broke. Seriously so. But I’ve spent more on parking in one night in D.C. than you’ll have to spend on one of these jackets. And the Flusstouch…is there…inside and out.
If I can spare it, I think I’m gonna go back before I leave tomorrow and snag this cardigan sweater. Surely there are fuzzier things than this cardigan number. The paisley-floral patterned shirts always catch my eye but I never seem to be able to rig ‘em up properly. Plus...LFG would f.l.i.p. out if I showed up in one of them. This sweater however, is just jaunty enough to aggravate my number one woman and that’s fine with me.
A bit of LFG aggravation will at least induce a grunt out of her and trust me—lately I’ve come to cherish churlish grunts and eye-rolls. Y’all tell me that it’s a phase but I’m too old for phases. Shut up.
So my mom was supposed to die in March. Two weeks in a coma of sorts and we decide to pull the plug on the respirator and say goodbye. Formulaic for middle aged kids to say goodbye to parents who at eighty-three years old with rapidly declining qualities of life are ready to go, right? This transcendental, humbling, defining event with my mom has taught me to tread these issues less stridently.

Instead of dying, my mom wakes up and is four-plus pissed off that she’s missed three episodes of The Walking Dead. My sibs and I...through tears and snot and bi-polar emotions are now laughing at and with our mom. Two more weeks in the ICU and then it’s rehab hospitals and another round at the acute care hospital and now after almost six months...home. She needs 24/7 care but my brother calculated that the cost of caring for her at home is no greater than at the nursing home. So here we are. And here this week...I am. My mom left home in an ambulance in March and with the exception of ambulance and transport rides, hasn't had the sunshine on her face since then.

And it's been good for me to again engage in this level of servitude. It puts everything else in perspective. Drywall repairs? New appliances to buy and install? That stuff's a walk in the damn park my friend. Let me tell you. My fully lucid mother who is once again opinionated and tasky and funny and loving…has the use of her hands. And that’s it.
I seek no accolades for helping my mom. It’s what I’m supposed to do. And if anyone deserves a medal, it’s my baby brother. He’s local and he’s put his life on hold for this. And that’s why when he and his partner decided to go ahead and get married last Saturday on the beach at Litchfield, who was I to say let’s wait till things settle a bit. Hell, things may never settle. So he’s honeymooning and I’m doing the five in the afternoon till nine in the morning shift solo. Bedpans and all.
I’m meeting with a carpenter in the morning to get a wheelchair ramp built. But it was so lovely yesterday that Bobbie Jean, mom’s angel who comes during the day, and I decided to lift that damn wheelchair ourselves and get mom out in the sunshine. How would you feel, the moment the sun kissed your face for the first time since March?

I will not be able to muster the words to describe it. I think being outside for thirty minutes in absolutely beautiful weather was as great for my mom as any pill or any physical therapy visit could ever be. The wheelchair ramp can’t get built fast enough. Daily rolls around the block will be as good an unguent as anything for my mom.
And then there’s Harry. I went to school with Harry from kindergarten through high school. He has cerebral palsy and lives next door to my mom. Harry’s parents bought the house next door and customized it so that Harry could live a dignified independent life there. And he does. To say that he’s an inspiration is an understatement. I wish that I could find a copy of the letter that he wrote my mom when my stepfather died five years ago. Harry is a big ole beautiful pile of humanity living in that gnarled, uncoordinated vessel of his.
Harry, like us, never figured that my mom would ever be home. So he’s seen the sporadic pulse of comings and goings next door as various ones of us have squatted in our childhood home while mostly staying with my mom at whatever facility she’s been in. And I can only assume that when he saw my mom outside, he got in his motorized wheelchair and bounded as fast as that thing would take him...out of the house to come over and see her.
You can’t fake this. The joy and love energy circling my mom and Harry was palpable. Their reunion was sublime. And I don’t give a damn if you call me a p_ssy for crying. I had to go get behind the azaleas for a minute so that they wouldn’t see me joyfully convulsing. Sweet.

So it’s off to meet with the wheelchair ramp man in the morning. Then back to the D.C. area in the afternoon. My intent is to make someone else joyfully convulse this weekend. Shut up.

Onward. Just freakin’ upside down with all that’s afoot. Butcept with a new Stein Mart Flusser sweater.

ADG II…Convulserator
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Attention Deficit Disorder Country Ass Meets the Hovey Sisters

October 13, 2013, 9:06 am
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On a lighter than usual note…happy Sunday. I figured that it was time for some randomanalia and irreleventia for a change. You know, some impertinence—like the old days. The infrequency of my stories seems to have resulted in me writing tear jerkers when I do. I promise this one will spare you my sleight of hand, “here, look at these clothes” and then BAM, slam you with some gut wrenching update about my mom or other optical waterworks inducing subplots regarding my self-contrived crucible.

As a matter of fact, I’ve done a one-eighty on my mom just as she’s done on us. She has her wheelchair ramp, courtesy of one of the kindest general contractors in Florence (And of course my financial largesse, which by the way, is getting less lar-jay by the minute) and is now able to re-join the outside world. To that end, I expect her to have a part-time job, at minimum, by this coming Friday. I’m serious. No more of this propped up on a hospital bed in the family room, lounging around doing crossword puzzles, watching the Food Network and otherwise living for the moment that Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy come on. I mean. Come on.
My rental property rehab days are finally over. I attached a towel rack to a bathroom and put two more knobs on cabinet doors this week and I’m done. And when I say that I’m done I mean that I will never attempt this again. Actually I won’t have to do such a dramatic rehab again since the place is now back to rental property—"visualize this as your home, prospective tenant"—neutral. Now I just need a tenant. Please. Hurry.
The joy and fun of moving into a little cottage with great bones that offers a stage for me to reinterpret the ADG foppish man-cave…you know…with all my caricature-toy soldiers-rugs-etchings and  other Attention Deficit Disorder Country Ass Meets the Hovey Sistersnuances…has really yet to manifest.
Don’t get me wrong. There have been flurries. But my time and energy have been mostly focused on sorting out the Old Town place. So it’s hard to return from the drywall re-do, nine coats of primer to hide someone’s crazy-ass idea about making a bedroom look like Ralph Lauren’s walk-in damn closet—and then—with prematurely arthritic elbow joints from all of the repetitive (everything one must do to mitigate the half-assness of previous home design accomplishments goat rodeos involves repetitive—motion) motion, giddily ideate how to do the same damn thing in your new/old digs that you are killing yourself to vanquish elsewhere. Crazy. I did manage to devote a wall to my images of Jimmy Whistler.
And the Marlborough Club caricatures, courtesy of Bertie hiring Carlo Pellegrini to draw them, are in the hall.
And Walter Greaves' pastel of Whistler on the Battersea Bridge, along with James Pryde's image of his brother-in-law, William Nicholson ride shotgun above Ernest Haskell's Whistler.
I’m confident that as things settle down over the next month or so, I’ll be able to enjoy my new place.  And I’ll have the unhurried and less burdened time to tweak things here and there and hang another whatever—and God knows—I’ve got an overabundance of whatevers—on the rapidly diminishing wall space. I’m also shedding another round of accumulata. Honestly, I was a bit shocked to see in one place, the aggregate of stuff that I’d piled up and into my office in Old Town, my CasaMinimus and a storage unit that I’ve had around the corner for years. How can one person amass so much sh_t?
 I’m not a hoarder…but only due to one significant characteristic. Hoarders literally cannot let go of anything. You’ve seen that pitiful show on television. When gently prompted to relinquish seven of their nine-thousand, sticky with residual fountain syrup, wax-paper drink cups from Dairy Queen; those people amp-up and go berserk. Or they deflate and sulk and cry. 
Or they launch into a machine-like manifesto, explaining why they have to think about it for a month or so before they finally decide. Butcept that’s the only thing that keeps me from being lumped right in there with ‘em. I’m happily thinning out my cache of tasty accretions and a few of you readers are already recipients of some of it. And there’s a lot more to come. And go. Shut up.
The exception to not having the physical and emotional fuel to daub paint and transform this new place is our work on LFG’s bedroom. Instead of water-thin Glidden ceiling paint at nineteen dollars a gallon, my baby deserved Benjamin Moore. They should call that stuff Benjamin More. Damn. 
So LFG picked a faintly blue-ish white to transform the putty like hue of her bedroom into what’s gonna be a really nice nest for her when we finish. Better paint is worth the money. The stuff went on like butter. Thirty one dollars per gallon More than Glidden.
And as I ponder LFG’s wall color choice and newly selected color and pattern of her pillow cases and duvet cover, I see a young lady. I see someone who in three years has transformed from the little girl who giddily helped me slop vivid paint colors on her bedroom walls as we made her bedroom look like the sequelae from Dr. Seuss and Barney having a wrestling match with the Grateful Dead—to a young lady with decided ideas about how to create a minimalist, uncomplicated palette in her new bedroom. Whose child is this?
Here’s her Old Town bedroom in case you’ve forgotten what a mosh pit of color caca we created over there. Lordy.
Ok so let’s go random for a bit. First up…a Belgians lesson. Do not go over to your rental property with Belgians on and decide to touch up a few things.
Here we have my blue Belgians…still amidst the pre-rubber sole break-in period…now adorned with Valspar High Gloss White…paint. I’m thinking about launching a Jackson Pollock inspired Belgians collaboration. Butcept one of the greatest things about the Belgian Shoe sovereigns is that they don’t give a damn about branding and collaboration and all of the other dressed by the Internet hipster irony that’s part of the edgy sartorial oeuvre. Bottom line is that you shouldn’t paint cabinets when wearing your Belgians.
And it’s not like I don’t have designated shoddings for such endeavors. Just didn’t have them with me at the time.
Let’s go from shoddings to socks. By the way, and this is Florence County South Carolina talking, if the socks cost more than ten dollars a pair, they’re hose. Yep. It’s a prissy word no doubt. But you just can’t call something that costs more than what an ounce of dope cost in 1974…socks.Not my rule—and God knows I’m not bashful about admonishments and rules—but I’m abiding by it. Oh, and for the record, seriously, I have no idea what an ounce of dope costs today. "V.K. Nagrani" ... sounds like a combination Campari-esque drink and a personal lubricant. "Baby, take a sip of THIS!" Shut up.
The lovely diamond spritzed leg sheathings preened above are from Coffman’s in Greenville, North Carolina. One of the highlights of the last year has been discovering this little sartorial oasis that’s about forty minutes off the beaten track of my I-95 to mama’s house sojourn.
Chief Hog Farmer F. Todd Howell sent me a gaggle of socks to say yes-no to. FTH, knowing full well that I lack the willpower to say no to all of them, assured himself some level of register ringing ROI for his effort. After all, there's baby formula to buy. "Baby, take a sip of THAT!" So I kept three and sent three back.
And finally, a quick up and back last Monday to Gotham saw me lunching with a sartorial legend and our stunning mutual friend…a woman to whom I proposed marriage after one glass of wine. A daytime record for me. And no, my sartorial legend lunch mate wasn’t George Frazier. As my friend ADF said regarding the housekeeper’s response shouted above the vacuum cleaner whir, to her inquiry regarding where the family dog was when Sparky failed to meet her at the door… “He dead!” Surely I’d a given a pretty penny to've had lunch with Frazier at Locke-Ober's…replete with his standing order of Finnan Haddie and a Bloody Mary—with a dash of celery salt. R.I.P. Frazier, Locke-Ober's and Sparky.
No. I popped the Frazier photo in here because of his Russell Plaid suit. I’m on the record for having an insatiable curiosity about Russell Plaid for quite some time now. But it’s a tricky medium and even though I didn’t know exactly what I wanted. I knew for certain what I didn’t. And most of what I’ve seen on the rack, I didn’t.
I’ll leave the rest of the Russell story for later when the finished work rolls in. For now though, trust me when I tell you that this one’s gonna be a doozy.
A doozy. Yep, it’s worth using that descriptor one more time as my blessed life has been one for most of 2013. The warm weather stunner above was supposed to be my Spring-Summer 2013 go-to fun jacket. And I began the bespokeydoke process with Rykken et al on this one way back in November 2012. But then my world blew up and it was last Monday that I finally got ‘round to the next to the last fitting. The thing’s been sitting in Paul Stuart for almost a year. Good news is that I’ll be busting warm-weather 2014 wide open in it. Maybe.

Ok, that’s it. Time to prep for Toronto. Leaving on Monday to help the Canadians figure out how to get long acting anti-schizophrenia medicines bumped up to preferred reimbursement status by the Provincial health plans. And you thought all I knowed about was…. Whatever.

Onward.
ADG II


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Sunday Ennui

October 20, 2013, 10:49 am
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The silence. Is killing me. And you people tell me this is gonna last for another four-plus years. I won't make it. 
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Bo-Bos and Woo-Woos

November 9, 2013, 9:03 am
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Since I still can’t seem to muster enough energy to write my usual drivel and since I’ve essentially retired from storytelling but just haven’t announced it, I figured I’d throw some half-ass stuff up on my blog before just giving it up totally.

So why not post emails that after writing them I think… “Hell, that’s a little blog story novella right damn there”. So here you go. I just sent this email to a pal of mine and figured that as opposed to nothing, I’d share this version of nothing with y’all. Oh…and my personal emails are even less grammatically correct than my blog stories. So there. Even with all of my grammar and syntaxicalated shortcomings, I still write better than most of you. People. Shut up. I'm mean right now.
“Ok. You started it…the whole thing of talking about private parts and stuff. I dated a woman a few years ago who (and I totally agree with her) went absolutely spastic over the new age trend of teaching little people…3 years old and older…the exact scientific/clinical names for private parts.

Her neighbor had a little four year old girl who would come up when my friend was walking her very tall foxhound and put both hands on her little knees, (not the dog’s knees, dumbass)lean under Sophie the foxhound and ask to see her…  “buh-gina”. Maybe it’s a Southern thing—but then again not…since my gal pal was originally from Ithaca N.Y.—but there ain’t nothing cuteabout a tender little young’un saying words like scrotum and vulva.

Call it juvenile or backwards or stupid but the onliest thing I EVER heard my paternal grandmother say…and it was sparingly…maybe three times in my little lifetime…to characterize boy-bits was “tallywhacker” and one of those times it was when she threatened to cut my grandfather’s off. And I taught my nephews when they were little fellas…both of whom are now grown-ish young men in their twenties…one a two tours of Afghanistan Marine veteran…the other a shoe designer in NYC…to refer to theirs as a “bo-bo”. And to this day they both still refer to it as such. Can you imagine? And think about the different journeys those two bo-bos have been on thus far.  I prefer the foibles of grown men being infantile about how they refer to their thangs as opposed to little people getting an A-plus for calling their junk by the terms doctors use.  

Ok, your Georgia O’Keefe thang got me going. I think her paintings are redundant as hell and yes, they do kinda look anatomically like a woman’s “woo-woo”. Sorry to have written a half-ass treatise on weenie names. Oh and here’s a little O’Keefe trivia for you. Before Stieglitz and New Mexico, she lived in Columbia South Carolina for one year and taught at the private college for girls… Columbia College. She hated it.

Ok…time to get movin’. I bet little “meth-mouth”man just grins his ass off while y’all are calling him that…like… “whatch’yall laughin’ so hard at? I’m happier than a hog in slop…I’m fed…my bottom’s dry…and I’ve got one hand on my bo-bo”


Onward.”
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A Buckhead Boy

November 12, 2013, 10:12 am
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A Buckhead Boy
     He was a man in full. Kinda low-key though. In a cardigan sweater. He was a doctor but he’d be the first to tell you that he couldn’t cure a damn thing. And he had an affection for V.W.s—Karmann Ghias especially. Old cars. Used cars. The kind professors could afford. I found him one once. At Jimmy’s V.W. Service in Hartsville and it was an old British racing green one. All original…intact and patinated. Like him. I picked up my bug at Jimmy’s and saw it for sale. I told his son, my little brother in the fratty and Doctor Jim snatched it up fast. And then my little brother in the fratty—his son—totalled it within months.

     Doctor Jim and his wife reminded me of old Atlanta…now long gone…paved over like most everything else these days. He was a Georgia boy. Kinda. His rare surname is still found in Loudon County Virginia but his people more precisely were from Lovettsville back when it was the country. Now Loudon County and little Lovettsville, Virginia—like old Atlanta and even precious Buckhead—are paved over. Like most everything else these days.

     He wasn’t exactly a Buckhead boy. He graduated from Grady High School and then West Georgia College and the University of Georgia before heading north to Maryland for his doctorate. He was Southern but there was no false gentility, no treacle about him. 

     And there was married student housing. Or at least I’ve conjured it from the stories here and there that his oldest son, one of my best buddies in the whole world, used to tell. Seems like the oldest of the five children remember the modest times when Doctor Jim was finishing his doctorate at Maryland. Unlike the youngest of the five who, when the sprinklers came to life on the golf course at the Florence Country Club, found himself suddenly soaked and went over to the tennis pro shop and charged himself a dry outfit to Doctor Jim’s tab. But only once.
     Surely there are a thousand teachers today who would say that at minimum, Doctor Jim., as Chairman of the Department of Education at Francis Marion College, influenced their journey. And I bet there are some who would credit him as the primary influence on their decision to become a teacher. But I don’t care so much about that as much as I do about his toy soldiers.

     Doctor Jim loved casting little lead soldiers and painting them and enjoying the fellowship of other toy soldier makers and collectors. I remember the first time I ever saw his little tucked away work space. And I always wondered how a busy professor with five kids found the time to painstakingly pour hot lead into molds and then paint the damn things so nicely. He made a Mess Dress WarGame set for me. I’ve always treasured it but now that Doctor Jim is gone I treasure it even more.

     So Doctor Jim’s oldest boy is like a blood brother to me. It’s a love-hate brotherly thing like all of those kinda connections are. Maybe not with you but they all are with me. I’m an easy acquaintance. I’m an uneasy friend. And that same boy, that oldest boy predicted my divorce while at my wedding. Butcept he never told me. Till after my divorce. Peckerhead.

     And Doctor Jim’s daughter…the only sister of the five was my almost-every-song dance partner at Cotillion for the entire season. Not because she liked me. It was more of an understanding, you see. We both had to get through it so we might as well get through it together.
     My thinking is that Doctor Jim didn’t govern himself day-to-day in ways that focused on what kind of legacy he’d eventually leave. He just didn’t seem wired that way. Husband, father, grandfather, teacher. Boy Scouts and the Braves and toy soldiers and Pawley’s Island…these things all rolled up…are his legacy.

Onward.

ADG II … Florence Boy
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Aviator Chairs and Grades

November 14, 2013, 4:39 am
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My little girl. My heart. The little bald headed toddler who used to feed me bits of bread so that I'd behave at the table…
…the little gregarious gal who swaggered around a honky tonk in South Carolina, balloon on tow, sorting out everything and everyone in the joint…
…mother to a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and currently, Grunter and Eye Roller in Chief when it comes to me…
…has done it again. First grading period for 8th grade. Straight A’s.
I think I’m going to buy a chair  to celebrate.

Onward. Aviation-ating

ADG II
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Soixante-neuf and an Open Letter to Pat Conroy

November 24, 2013, 7:55 am
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Soixante-neuf…Sixty-nine. As much as I flirt with alternatives, I end up wearing a navy blazer sixty-nine percent of the time. Rain or shine, summer or winter, it’s a navy damn blazer for me. And I’ve just added yet another one to the fold.
Ok, I’m now off the hook for positing something about clothes so let’s move on to my open letter to Pat.

Dear Pat,

My buddy Lou owns a house on Fripp around the corner from you and says that he sees you from time to time at CVS. He says that you look ok but my selfish ass wants to admonish you to get crackin’ on another novel. Fast like. Enough already with these interim books.

Don’t get me wrong, Pat. I’m digging all these little placeholder books that you’ve published and I’m sure the cash flow from them is stronger than wolf nookie and really, who doesn’t fancy cash and a steady flow of it? And wolf nookie? I don’t know. But I’ll stand by the metaphor.

And these interim Conroy books aren’t where you want your home-stretch legacy to live. In your heart of hearts you too know that another Beach Music or Prince of Tides is what we need. Come on Pat, we need another novel.
I loved My Reading Life. I really did. It opened my eyes once again to the tortured genius of Thomas Wolfe. And My Losing Season was ok, too. Truth? I’ve read every f_cking word you’ve published. I even gave My Reading Life to one of my surrogate dad’s—the guy who hired me on at a Swiss Pharma company when I was a kid.
Photo borrowed from my buddy Reggie Darling
He’s the guy who first gave me Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden and told me that there were as many line management lessons to be learned therein as there were gardening tips. Most people wouldn’t a got it. But I did and you’d a gotten it too. Like me, he made his way into an industry that provided well for him but his true passions were elsewhere. He has an English degree from Carolina and I’m convinced that he hired me because he saw in me the same right-brained energy that he loved about himself. And like me, he never had a dad.
And Pat, Flo just made me aware of The Death of Santini. I could order it from Amazon but it won’t get to me till Tuesday. And I can’t wait that long. I’m gonna pay more for it and pick it up at Barnes and Noble so that I can read it tonight. I’ll sponge it up because for some reason these books….with their pathos confessed, violations reported, unrequited whatevers, and the frail treaties that at least some of you assholes were  able to cobble with your dads still draws me in like a moth to flame. You’d think I’d get enough of this formulaic caca but the half-life of any insights gained is for me a nanosecond. And the close-that-hole-in-my-heart unguent schmear offered therein wears off before I finish these kinda shitty books. Don’t be angry, Pat. It’s me, not you.
Photo Source
You might think that my pithiness is uncalled for and my bitterness should be better managed by now. On the other hand, I bet not. Because it’s obvious that like me with my dad, you are still trying to work out your shit with Colonel Conroy, even after the guy co-signed books with you amidst your tentative peace.
Photo Source
And the record shows a few photos of you and your dad, post Great Santini where he looks smug and self-satisfied and you look like you always do. In every photograph…frail and tentative. You’ve never lost that look you know. Neither have I. The frail tentativeness of your gangly adolescence is simply replaced fifty years later with an edematous version of the same. And I’m right behind you old sport. Genetics keep me from being as Humpty Dumpty gelatinous as you but my nose is getting bigger and purple-er by the month. So I’ll read your damn book but what I want to read is one of those big-ass novels of yours with imagery that blasts off the page and wraps around my head in ways that make me forget the rest of the world for at least an hour or two. 
Just so you’re confident that it’s me, not you...and just so you know that you aren't alone in your working shit out with daddy pathos, here are a pile of other books that I’ve read and re-read on the subject. You and I aren’t special, buddy. After the death of my friend’s dad and my listening to Dickey read his Buckhead Boys poem over and over, I re-read Summer of Deliverance in one sitting week before last. Dickey at fils et al is a bell ringer and the pathos, while not as physical as the ass whippings that Colonel Conroy put on you, are just as strong. My dad was more Dickey than your dad Conroy but was probably more of a physical coward than either.
Flusser led me to Merkin and then to Frazier. I’ve read Another Man’s Poison countless times and for some reason I tend to keep this little book in my reference pile. The sartorial pearls are intriguing but the examples of Frazier’s writing are what's so damn stellar. But then there’s his broken marriage and his protracted house of cards financial ruinous state while still deeply loving his two cast here and there amidst divorce drama sons. It’s this spore in the story that mighta fuelled the four hour dinner I had with one of his sons a couple of years ago. Of all the failed dads in this load of ADG drivel, I think Frazier showed that he loved his boys better than the rest of 'em. And that's a low-ass bar I'm setting. Let me tell you.
And God knows that the Wolff brothers might’ve had the wildest story to tell about dads. Narcissistic sociopaths rarely make for good fathers. But damn…my goodness, the adventures they can take you on.
Pat, I really wish that Blake Bailey’s Cheever had been three hundred pages shorter. Of all these dad pathos books, this is the one that had me saying every other page… “this is my dad, this was my life”. And Federico Cheever…Fred Cheever seemed to be me. After I finished the book, I even tracked down Fred Cheever and was going to send him an email telling him that I’d lived his same journey. But then I thought better of it. He seems to have put all this junk to rest better than most of us.

So Pat, thanks for the new book. I’m sure I’ll hoover it up in a sitting or two. But please, no more of this shit till we get another novel. Now let me slip on a navy blazer and head over to Barnes and Noble.

Onward. Sixty-nine percent of the damn time.


ADG II

And what the hell? How 'bout some Color Him Father by the Winstons.
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Turkey Miscellany—Conroy-Meermin-and Stein Mart Serpentining

December 1, 2013, 10:17 am
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*It’s Sunday morning December 1st. I began this little ditty on Thanksgiving morn but never got around to finishing it. I’m back in Bethesda now and LFG is again with her mom so the deafening silence of my house is just perfect for completing such drivel. Many of you know that spellcheck is the best I do with these things—clean-up wise. But I did notice that I've overused the word “ass” in this story and I’m not inclined to change it. Sometimes words…even ones that debase, cheapen or accelerate a sentence…can’t be replaced and their redundancy is immutable. Shut up.

I’ve got stuff to say. More precise stuff. Stuff that with just a bit of editorial rigor would have you in syncopating tears of laughter and joy. But precision and editorial curettage ain’t gonna be part of this pile. Mainliest reason is that it’s Thanksgiving morning and at 913am all remains quiet in my childhood home and I don’t want to be precise and rigorous. Plus I’m a little gassy.

LFG is asleep in my sister’s childhood bedroom and my big-ole baby brother is in the room that circumstances dictated I had to share with his little late to the family party ass. I’ve yet to hear my mom stir but then again, she’s been keeping late hours these days. What with all the QVC and Food Network watching and her never miss Alec’s Jeopardy and what not. My mom…this not yet finished with life gal is busy these days.
Every Thanksgiving for the last forever…forever being probably the last three or four years…I’ve said “well, this is surely the last one that mom’s gonna be healthy enough to cook her formidable spread for us”. And now that time is upon us. Kinda. I sat at the kitchen table last night watching my mom convey bark in as strong a voice as she’s ever had, all of the intricacies and process steps involved in preparing her cornbread dressing and various other loved-by-all turkey day concoctications. And she was passing the cypher not to me but to my baby brother. He was doing the doing and I was doing the watching.

And then I remembered that this reaper reprieve my mom is amidst may be temporal so I asked her to recite to me the secret code for a few of my childhood faves from her kitchen oeuvre. I jotted as fast as she would recollect and she got predictably miffed when I asked her about measures and amounts. “I don’t know. Just taste it ‘till you like it.” That’s my mom. And probably yours too…unless you had one of those mamas that didn’t cook and if you did I feel real sorry for you.
I’m an emotional coward. I’ve long since reconciled it and after fifty-plus years, have actually come to own it. Owning is stronger than reconciling for you mugwumps who have nothing better to do than read blogs with some kind of copy editor ass attitude. Ok? Ok. So I’m sitting here in the living room this morning and there’s some kinda weird comfort about reading Conroy’s book in the house where similar sounds of conflict emanated and identical conditions of gastric twisted upness escalated as my father’s car came down the driveway—usually way too late for dinner.
And the later my dad’s arrival, the more strangulated my little belly became. The strength of his whiskey breath was indexed to the lateness of his arrival. So why the comfort? Even though Conroy found some reconciliation with his father—something I’ll never have—my dad was a f_cking saint compared to this sometimes monster Santini who lorded over Pat’s life.

I’ll never be able to explain the gut twist associated with not knowing which dad we would get when the door opened…a happy, mawkish dad with a buzz or a drunker, meaner man.  And the gut twist was an odd one. It wasn’t nausea. Nowhere near it actually. It was more of a “we better shut down your alimentary tract for the next three days as you haul ass across the savannah…zig-zag like...in an effort to outrun that big-ass cat.” Kind of a serpentine scurry while being shot at a la Peter Falk and Alan Arkin in The In-Laws… “serpentine, Shel, serpentine”.  I think I’ve landed on a working title for the childhood segment of my memoirs…No Time to Dooky. 

And finally, let me offer an apology to Pat Conroy—as if he’s sitting there yearning for one. I flippantly defined all of his non-novel caliber books as filler and place holders for the real things…his more robust word candy stuff that a zillion of us have come to love. I was wrong. After finishing The Death of Santini last night, I realized that the book is (hopefully for the tortured Conroy) a cathartic and necessary opus that’s anything but filler. My childhood and my life journey in general has been nirvana compared to the Conroy clan. Shut the f…
Once again I’ve managed to turn this little ditty into a maudlin pile of whateverishness. So let’s go superficial. And Meermin shoes are as good a place as any to launch my shallow vessel. The first pair that I ordered…$240.00 bucks all-in…represented a curious itch that I had to scratch and at that price I was willing to gamble. Double the price and it would be fair, almost necessary, to ask the proverbial…“yeah but what will they look like a year from now?” Well I can tell you that I’m wearing the hell out of suede pair number one and I’m sure that a year from now I’ll say that I’ve more than gotten my money’s worth.
So early last week I queued up for pair number two. This time I’m sampling the scotch grained monks avec the ersatz Dainite sole. At this rate/price, my Cleverley bespoke days might be over. But not till my bespoke carpincho bluchers arrive. Hold me.
And after next week…my last billable week for the year, I’ll write a comprehensive story about my maiden Paul Stuart bespoke voyage with my buddy Mark "Puerto" Rykken. I figured a navy blazer was a good place to start since I’ve never had one.
Ok. I lied. Hell, I took two of them to South Carolina for Thanksgiving. It’s the little black dress of man clothes. Shut.
While I was home I popped over to Stein Mart and the Flusser goods have gone from tasty to just damn showing-ass-off. Paisley corduroy GTH jackets and of course, no pixie sizes for fellas like me. They know their local chubby market.
 I figure that the half dozen GTH cord jackets at Stein Mart Florence…smallest in-stock size...44 Regular…will go to the four, type-2 diabetes totin’, barbecue eatin’ (not that there’s anything wrong with that) effeminate heterosexual guys in town and the other two…well.
My phone rang recently and it was the Fluss himself. En route to Florence and a book signing at Stein Mart. I was touched that he asked about going by and seeing my mama and I was even more delighted when he asked me to put him on a lunch spot fitting for a Buddhist non-kosher Jewish boy from Gotham. So I sent him to Rogers Barbecue. That’s the Great Flusstini with my best childhood buddy AWH.
The onliest Flusser thing available at Stein Mart in my size was a cashmere sweater. I pounced at fiddy-nine dollahs. Bam.
So let me close out this turgid wad of irreleventia with an update on the ADG Cracker Code. It looks like I barely made the cut. Not that my DNA is gonna be too hard to map (I DO want my report thang to come back with a profile that has me sorted out with DNA including some Neanderthal, a dose of Ashkenazi and some sliver of African in there too. I mean really...I'm already interesting to have at cocktail parties and cookouts but damn...If I can say with DNA evidence, that I'm one of the first families of earth with a smidge of Yiddish and a dash of Zulu, I'm gonna be hard to stop.) but it appears that the FDA has requested that 23andMe stop selling their tests. I’m sure they’ll get it all sorted out and in the meantime, here’s to hoping that the 23andMeMinions are hard at work unravelling my serpentinescent code.

Onward.

ADG-Two. Serpentining.
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Invictus

December 5, 2013, 4:25 pm
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Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. 
William Ernest Henley


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Holiday Miscellany

December 19, 2013, 5:19 am
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And miscellany this shall be. Shut up.
Oh…but before you shut up and I take over; let me pop this story with something sartorial. Because it seems like that’s what this venue used to focus on. I need to confess my guilt…about over-fuzzying this jacket. I’ve taken a perfectly sublime, ain’t gonna see ones-damn-self walking down the street in the same Russell Plaid jacket, ADG tasty contrivance…and tarted it up so over-the-damn-top-ly that even I, the Potentate of P-tang, can’t wear it out of the damn house. 
So I’ll have that Velveteen Rabbit meets a Vegas hotel suite sofa cushion collar…removed. And then I’ll write a proper story about how this jacket came to be. Shut…I’m serious. I don’t want to hear it.

I’ve said it to scores of people…While my blessings absurdly outweigh my challenges, I’ll be giddy when 2013 is over. It’s been a rich year, life-learning wise and my lessons learned-humility account is filled to the damn brim. My pugnacious declarations regarding my desire for 2013 to pass are  balanced with the knowing that if I crow too much about ’13 being behind us, the karma coordinators may show me a 2014 that makes this one look like a stroll through Burlington Arcade. It’s all about balance. Or something.

And one of the most amazing blessings this year has been my mother’s decision to not yet leave us. I believe, deep, deep, down in my being, that if we; amidst chronic disease or the end of our life journey, have some unfinished something that we've yet to reconcile or say or do or experience, we won’t let go. I’m not sure why my mom didn’t die in March. All I know is that the doctors remain pretty much speechless and when science and data driven clinicians use twee-ass words like miracle, I take notice. So amidst the humbling—for her and us—duties involved with helping my mom, we are all aware that every day she remains with us is indeed a blessing.
I drove over to spend one evening with her after my uncle’s funeral the other day and she was to say the least, on her game! Sharp as a damn tack and in my grill about how I was arranging her leg pillows and her three blankets that have to be just damn right and her little footies that I put on her feet inside-out and you’d a thought that I’d chopped her feet off. And then we laughed after I finally, barely, got things arranged to suit her.
I hadn't been to the family farm in years so my trip down was filled with all sorts of memories and speculations about how I’d feel when I got there. While it’s sad to see the once bustling tobacco farms essentially idle—mainly because it’s winter—we rent the land to other sower-reapers so during the seasons, there is life and activity and the fallow fields are planted and life emanates. But I loved being there and my uncle’s funeral was sweet. More later on the farm because there’s fodder for at least one story.
Before…
After…And yes, I realize that you're doing the“what the flip is this project ‘cause I know that LFG ain’t a part of it” head scratch right now. Well just wait till I write the story. 
Socks…I told you this was gonna be a disjointed pile of irreleventia and collateralia. My latest obsession is with these oversized houndstooth thangs that F. Todd HogFarmer Howell of Coffman’s Menswear has been sending me…NOT for free. I pay the freight because my man FTH has a lovely little gal to spoil and I know what kinda dough that requires. So when I find something I like, I get duplicates and I’ve had FTHogg, the most mismatched swathier alive, supply me some spares of these babies.
And I owe my man Vinnie of DeoVeritas shirts a story and review of this bulletproof pink oxford cloth shirt that I commissioned over at his site. So until I do so, please go over to his fully automated, order with ease website and make yourself one. Please.
LFG was supposed to be over here at my Bethesda digs like every other day after I moved within five minutes of her, right? I mean...wasn’t that the strategy for moving here? Well so far it ain’t happenin’. What was I thinking? That her blessed and over-scheduled life would suddenly be less so? Christmas is in six days and we still ain’t got no tree. I’m gonna go and buy an inflatable one today.
But her holiday dance recital last weekend was just great. Surprise I know, but I’m as proud a parent when in the audience as anyone could be…regardless of how the performances go.
This year was different though. I can see real talent and I can see an incrementally more skilled and accomplished dancer in my not so little LFG. Her mother and I both marvelled at how this year’s recital showed us a daughter who’s a really talented performer. And then I went home. Alone.
Meermin…If anyone should pay me for shilling…which to-date nobody has, it should be Meermin. At $240.00 a throw, I’m awaiting pair number two. Merry Christmas. To. Me.
Let me close this one out with my mom’s next door neighbor, Harry. I shared photos of Harry and my mom when we finally got her out of the house and Harry bounded over to love up on her. I posted this on my tumblr but it’s sublime enough to share again. The best by far, Christmas card of 2013.
Onward. Randomly and Houndstoothically.


Eighty-Gee. Bofe
Oh! And one more thing. My all-time favorite Christmas song is Boogie Woogie Santa Claus sung by Mabel Scott. But her admonition for Santa to ... "run, run, run Mister Santa--jump, jump, jump Mister Santa" disturbs me. He's overweight and probably a type-2 diabetic with mild congestive heart failure. And we don't need his jolly ass on Worker's Comp. bam.
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Christmas 2013

December 25, 2013, 5:30 am
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It’s almost eight o’clock on Christmas Eve morning and I’ve just returned from Dulles airport and dropping LFG and her mom off for their flight to Florida. This was my year to have LFG for the Christmas break but being the accommodating piñata guy that I am, I relented and sent my baby to Florida for fun and frolic versus Florence where it will be a bit more of a vigil. Shut up.
So LFG and I had our Christmas present fun last night…And while the “still believes in Santa” excitement is long gone, the fun and fellowship with a young adult daughter is a new kind of bliss. It is. And luckily everything that I was directed to procure for our gal was available online and in the correct sizes and colors so my gift gathering was easy. There was no ambiguity regarding what my young’un wanted. Including this calf-foot-leg stretcher thang that dancers use to accomplish the aforementioned. And my gal has turned into a serious dancer so she needs seriously damn expensive contraptions like this one. Alas.
Vans tennis shoes? Yep. These things were popular in the late 70’s, no? And hers had to be this particular color and in the low-profile, non-clunky version seen here. Precision in preference. I have no freakin’ clue where this proclivity comes from. Shut…
A young girl’s grooming and beauty book. I read the reviews on it and it’s solid. None of this “let’s focus on what’s wrong with your body and make you yearn to be something you aren’t” caca here. Cosmopolitan magazine has a rapier focus on making women feel inadequate and yearning for more-different-better. We’re trying to avoid that over here. With one exception…
LFG wanted better-different Hunter boots. Plus, her foot is still growing and her purple Hunters from two Christmases ago are a bit snug. And yes, she got more of those inserts to go in them. These are cable knit topped. Yep.
But the big difference is the fat racing stripe on the back. This my friends is a game changer. It's all about fuzzy nuance and this is after all...my daughter. Bam!
So on to my goods. LFG took special delight in watching me unwrap my James and the Giant Peach DVD. She and I read and re-read Dahl’s book a zillion times when she was little. It’s one of our favorites and we even talked about writing a sequel together.
J. McLaughlin socks, a Barnes and Noble gift card and a cool pocket square. I’ll wear the socks and square if for no other reason than my daughter picked them out.
The best J. Mc. gift might indeed be the wool foulard scarf. I can’t describe the texture adequately but it’s kinda spongy. I’m going back after Christmas to see what other versions they might have of it and if they’re on sale, I might snag another one. Yes, it's that fuzzy.
But the epic gift that I of course arranged procurement was this set of little lead soldiers...Heyde Pensioners. This almost one hundred year old set of pot-bellied caricature soldiers is rare to the point of non-existence. I’d never seen them in situ before…having only gandered photos from an auction two years ago where a boxed set of these went for crazy money. LFG Dad was able to snag these for a considerably lower price. 

But not that much lower. I can rationalize anything. Shut up.

Christmas Morning
I began this story yesterday morning but had to hit the road before I finished it. I’m now home with my mom—where I should be and it’s humbling and instructive to once again be in her service. We had a nice Christmas Eve visit and today my brother will do the Christmas cooking. My mom is sweet and is as appreciative to be here for another Christmas as we are to have her. But last night when I was setting up my Christmas tree that I bought down for her and I wasn't doing things freakin'exactly like she would do it, she told me that I had the patience of a rattlesnake. I told her to zip it…or I’d make her sleep in her wheelchair. Kidding.
Onward. Smokin’ one of those little baby cigars from my new cigar box Christmas ornament.
And rattlin'.

ADG-Two

  
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The Grubworm

December 26, 2013, 7:37 am
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I’ve written about my Aunt Kat on a few occasions over the years. She passed away a few years ago and I miss her terribly. My mom is the youngest of ten kids...my Aunt Kat was the next youngest and all my life, she lived no more than fifteen minutes away. She was a force to be reckoned with and was a jelly making, pie baking, gossiping her ass off vessel of love. She and my Uncle Jim only had one child, daughter Susie who’s about ten years older than me.
LFG has missed out on relationships with most of my mom's siblings...they've all gone on now except for one. But LFG and my Aunt Kat had a very nice rapport and I’m happy for that. The photo above is of LFG, my mom and Aunt Kat about to head out to pick strawberries in McBee, South Carolina.
My Aunt Kat’s first husband, Uncle Jim, died when I was ten years old but I loved the hell out of him for the short time that I knew him. It’s clear to me now but I was oblivious to their intent when my uncles and other dads would step in and take the place of my absent father.  And Uncle Jim was keen on high impact shenanigans. He was so damn full of love and mischief that he was just wired to be a dad and uncle and spoiler and prankster. And he loved me. That's Uncle Jim sitting beside my bow tied dad at my Aunt Inez' Sunday dinner table. My Aunt Kat, in the striped blouse is standing beside my mom. I was just a twinkle in the bow tied guy's eye when this picture was taken.
I learned many years after his death that he too was a member of the Greatest Generation. And like most veterans, he spoke nothing of it or at least very little. My Aunt Kat told me that he’d sometimes cry in the middle of the night after they were married.  She begged him to tell her what it was and he told her. Once.  He drove or was one of the crew members on those landing craft…Higgins boats…vessels that dropped Marines or Army troops off on the shores of Pacific islands during WWII. And he told my Aunt Kat that some of the boys were so scared that they didn’t want to exit the boat. He said he could see it in their eyes and he felt guilty having to help make them get off the boat.
But Uncle Jim said what haunted him and made him cry at night sometimes was the memory not of the dropping off but the picking up...Transporting the dead, including just partial bodies and the screaming wounded on the same vessel that dropped the young, scared but physically intact boys off to meet their fate. There’s so much PTSD today, my Marine nephew being one who’s challenged with it, but I’m thinking that my Uncle Jim and others like him had their own silent PTSD for decades. But I never knew it. All I knew was his love.
Uncle Jim owned a grocery store and when I was a toddler, I’d have the run of the place. But what excited me most about Uncle Jim was the Grubworm. He had a 1963-ish Econoline van that he drove on the weekends and for his grocery store tasks. And he said it looked to him like a grubworm. So he had someone paint “Grubworm” on the front and his name on the driver side door. And he’d take me to ride in it. Whenever I wanted. 
I can’t convey in words the excitement of riding in a truck whose engine is right up there in the cab with you. And when my three or four year old imagination was at work in tandem, hell, my Uncle Jim might as well have been Alan Shepard or John Glenn and the Grubworm, the Freedom 7. I mean really…how many kids get to ride in such a curious little vehicle and especially one that had a personality conveyed through its owner and painted on moniker?
So I wanted to honor my Uncle Jim by re-creating to the degree my imagination would let me, the Grubworm. And I’m dropping it off at my cousin Susie’s house tomorrow. It was a fun little project…kind of an ADG meets American Restoration…half-ass style. My first task was to find an old toy Econoline truck. I snagged one courtesy of eBay and then had to figure out how to make it less toy-ish and more faithful to the green color and blackwall tires of my Uncle Jim’s Grubworm.
Old advertisements from the 60’s helped fill the bill as well as discussions with my mom regarding what the Grubworm looked like and how the lettering was done. Of course my wild-ass imagination had an actual grubworm caricature worm on the front of it. Shut up.
And then I taped it off.
And painted it. The wrong color. Too light.
And painted it again. Too glossy and too green.
And again. Not perfect but close enough. I then had to get rid of the whitewalls.
Finally I went online and learned how to make decals. Voila…here’s the Grubworm.


I think it’s easier to further explain my story by just letting you read my letter that accompanies the Christmas wrapped box containing Uncle Jim’s Grubworm. Here it is… 

December 24th, 2013
Dear Susie,
Sometimes I miss Aunt Kat so bad I can’t stand it. Mom and I say more than once a day that it just doesn’t seem right not having aunt Kat walk in the back door saying “heeeey…I brought y’all something!” I’ve loved all of the Cole sisters but it’s no secret that I was crazy about your mom. We all loved Aunt Inez to death and whether it’s true or not, I know that I was one of Inez’s favorites so I’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of love from the sisters. But Aunt Inez was the matriarch and everybody had to love her! I’m especially mindful of how great it’s been to have so many loving aunts as my mom’s now amidst the last, fragile chapter of her journey.

I have five more years’ worth of jelly that your mom made and a lifetime of pictures to keep her present in my mind. And even though uncle Jim died so many years ago, I have vivid memories (or at least they are vivid in the way that my imagination can conjure the hell out of things!) of loving him too. I was only ten years old when Uncle Jim died.

I remember his tickly moustache and his pipes. Seems like there was a pipe stand with several of his pipes on it. Am I dreaming that up? And when I was a little fella and had to wear suspenders to keep my pants up, I’m told that he taught me to answer “Dusty Baggy Britches” when someone asked me my name.

And someone would give me a dollar bill to spend at Jim’s Corner and I’d get some candy or a little toy and Uncle Jim would take over the register and hit every damn button on the cash register ringing up my purchases like an orchestra conductor. He’d take the dollar from my little hand and make change…giving me more than a dollar back. And remember the little brown sacks of penny candy that he’d bring? Squirrel Nuts, Red Hots, bubble gum, Mary Janes.  And candy cigarettes and necklaces and those straws full of sugar. It’s a wonder any of us had a damn tooth left in our heads.  I might have had a shitty dad but I’ve been blessed to have aunts and uncles and grandparents who made my childhood pretty memorable.

People ask me all the time how I know so much of the early to mid-1960’s R&B and pop music. I tell them that my mom was the youngest of ten kids and that I had a zillion older cousins who, when I was just a little fella, would be playing 45s of all that great music. I remember as a teenager going through a stack of your 45s or albums that were still over at aunt Kat’s house. The Tams.

Am I dreaming this up too? Did Richard, when he was dating you and y’all were home from college, put on socks just to come in and pick you up and then take them off again once y’all got in the car? Was it Uncle Jim who would have a fit about Richard not wearing socks? And now you and Richard are going to be grandparents. Damn I’m getting old.

Oh shit, and how could I forget the “Santy Claus Trap”? Remember? Uncle Jim would take us back behind his store and point to one of those outbuildings/sheds and say that he had a “Santy Claus Trap” in there and that he was gonna catch him and not let him leave us presents. But he would let on just enough that it wasn’t true so that we wouldn’t get upset…we’d just stay curious and sceptical because I think in our little four year old minds we knew that Uncle Jim was too good a man to do something so terrible to us and to Santa Claus. But he got us wondering and worrying…just a little bit.

But my most exciting memory of Uncle Jim is of the Grubworm! Susie, I couldn’t have been more than three or four when he had that truck. “Wanna go ride in the Grubworm?” Of course I did. What little boy wouldn’t want to ride in a truck? Especially one named after a damn worm? And I remember being scared and curious that the engine was right up there with us in the cab.

My memories are vague since I was so young but I think about the Grubworm from time to time and kinda had an idea of what it looked like…at least in my mind’s eye.  And I’m sure that I haven’t gotten it just right but I loved creating my version of the Grubworm from an old metal Econoline toy truck that I got on eBay. I found some old advertisements on the internet to try and get the correct color of green, too.  It’s close but not perfect…after I painted it three different colors of green before I was satisfied! And I learned to make and print decals for the lettering.

So here’s the Grubworm for you, Susie!
Love,

Dust
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I Just...

August 20, 2014, 5:27 pm
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...wanted to see what it would feel like to write something over here.
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Just Write--Something

September 20, 2014, 7:29 am
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“Just write. Something”. Ok, I’m writing. About what I don’t know.

The above request/admonishment was posited by the one of those few readers who for some silly-ass reason seem to think that they’re missing something due to my hack-scrivener’s sabbatical.

Truth though is that I miss telling stories. And I thought that channeling my writing energies into more industry articles and white papers  for my consulting business would yield more…business. Come on. If at my peak, I could get between one and two thousand knuckleheads every day to read my “oh look at my cute daughter and these crazy ass pants I had Flusser make and oh-my-damn-goodness how they just make these papier-mâché Belgian loafers pop”—then surely I could become more of a thought leading presence in my professional space, right?

And of course there were those once per month maudlin ditties about my mama who won’t die or my daddy who left me nursing an intractable, open wound in my heart. Oh, and the divorced man uber-father “your daughter is so lucky to have a dad like you” cries. If I didn’t make somebody’s ass cry at least once per month I felt like I wasn’t hacking properly. Can one cry out of their ass? Shut up.

I can now say that after these many months not blogging, the opposite has occurred. We are amidst, albeit still a blessed one, a very slow business year after five back-to-back bell ringers. Causation-correlation? Hell, I don’t know but it seems like a good enough excuse to write maybe a story per week. We’ll see.

Oh, and the tumblr thing hasn’t helped at all. It’s the monosodium glutamate of digital media. It’s a truncated no-brainer for me and it poaches visual cues and ideas that pre-tumblr would have become a blog story.  Should I shut it down?

Is my Mojo limping back? My Groove sputtering towards a restart? I’d like to consider myself one who never really needed a groove or mojo to churn out sausage-like, the volume of caca that I did before. But I can unequivocally say that I’m about as mojo-less at present than I have been in ages. Am I trying in some kinda half-ass way to believe that if I start the time sucking five hours per week writing blog stories, my overall mojo will improve? I’m having a harder time rationalizing this than I do when justifying the dosh to pop for a pair of bespoke Cleverley’s.  

Less was never more for me—you know that. My A.D.D. gift—and it truly is a gift—always precluded any level of editorial discipline when my blog posits were strung together. That’s why you’d get one story that involved shoes, Robert E. Lee, Dover Sole, LFG’s squawking clarinet concert, the banishment of madras and GI Joe. And you’d tell me that the twisty-turny-ness of it was great. Wonder if they’d be better or worse if I stopped taking my meds?
So what will I write about? Maybe the fact that after one year of living in in my Bethesda Cottage Minimus, my move feels kinda like LFG and I planned thoroughly and collaborated precisely on a party and nobody came.
Or perhaps I’ll bemoan any kind of change or progress, even though as a consultant and teacher, I get paid to deal in, facilitate-incite-offer glimpses of its inevitability. 
And maybe I’ll lament the transitory nature of life and I’ll use LFG’s started two weeks ago, freshman year of high school—I still can’t believe it—as my latest pain point. 
Three more years and she'll be packing her bags for college. Damn. She was just learning to write her name in cursive when I first shared her with you. 
And there’s always shoes. And lately its been kilim slippers...that are becoming mainstream faster than Belgians did. And this ain't a good trend. 
Can't forget Shell Cordovan. There's always something to say about horse hide.
Or Bernese Pooches.
I'm over the top in love with this breed and I will have one. 
Maybe a ditty about beards.
And why I can't seem to let mine grow beyond 3.5 weeks.
Or the first eye exam I had in six years--couldn't pass the highway department eye test--and the fact that progressive lenses are the best invention since central damn air-conditioning. Oh, and contact lens--the newest lens material/technology is great. 
And the kick-ass resurrection of Bookster and their new and improved fishtail trousers--a waistband affectation that if everybody else starts wearing, I'll ban in a heartbeat. Shut the ....
Or the admirable, Dorothy Parker doppelganger-esque wife of Todd Hog Howell--the gal who in my own home, during her first visit, flicked a booger on me. Oh, and she nicknamed me "D-Bag" within twelve hours of plopping down her girl supplies in the bathroom. Damn. 
Oversized houndstooth? I can. You can't. Nobody should. Shut up.
And art...with the never boring back story, sleuthing, learning, correlating missions that sometimes even the most twee and insignificant sketch offers me.
Or the fact that I'm not a hoarder but I can't throw anything remotely sentimental away.
Nothing. 
And books...and the fact that this book-per-week-at-least (with meds) can no longer finish a book. 
And my mama—at least for a while longer.

So let’s see what the next few weeks hold. But should I dump my tumblr?

Onward. ADG-2

(Thank God there’s not a 3rd one)
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My Mama-Socks-And Hoping to Die at 75

October 19, 2014, 9:27 am
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Look at these great socks. Princeof Wales Check—Prince of Wales Plaid—Glen Plaid—Glenurquhart Check—Glenurquhart Plaid. 
When was the last time you saw a pair of these? Never. That's right.
Seems that there are lots of names for this pattern. And the nuancified, overwrought cataracts that differentiate these definitions/characterizationsare tedious. Honestly, who gives a sh_t? It’s a pattern just jaunty enough to dodge boredom and variable enough in its repitition to sidestep redundancy. 
Domesticated Wildness. Think about it. As long as the Glen is woven within reasonable color combinations and scales, it conveys a rather civilized and, especially in our current world of slovenly dress, cleaned up—buttoned up—casual formality.
Yet blow the scale up and contrive it with other outta scale caca and what have you? A damn clown outfit.
Now don't get me wrong. You can play with color and scale to a fair degree and still avoid clowndom. Todd Hogg Howell teeters on the edge with his overcoat.
Here’s another example of what happens when you take traditional patterns and make 'em fuzzified beyond good measure. This abusive goat rodeo of pattern inbreeding broke out in houndstooth and there's nothing domesticated about this wildness. It flat out jumped the fence and started shamelessly licking itself...in front of everyone, right in the middle of the road. Best thing that could happen here is for a car to come run over it mid-lick. Lordy. Just wait till you see what I do with the Glen hose. Shut up.
Kind of a Domesticated Wildness this Glen thang is. Yep. That’s it. Sorta like the Beatles’ North American debut strategy. Domesticated Wildness. Jackets and ties on the Ed Sullivan show. None of that hippie ass beatnik-alated kit. Suits. And ties. Yet accompanied by head bobbing mop top hair that American parents found off putting and American girls found irresistible.
Here's the Beatles' third appearance on Ed Sullivan's show. See for yourself. 
And Chelsea boots. Not those usual shoddings that accompany suits intended for the City, Church’s cap toed whatevers from their home country. Not for these boys. Chelsea Boots—boots that conveyed keeping your daughter out past curfew, having been let into the Colony Room Club in Soho because your dad knows Francis Bacon. Oh, and their pants were ever so slightly slim. Not tight. Not in a pecker protrusion way. Remember, this was 1963 and the Jim Morrison leather britches potato in the front routine woulda never made it onstage at the Ed Sullivan Theater. But their pants were just so-so enough  to just piss off dads and intrigue dad’s little girl. Nice boys but watch them. They'll shag your sister.
How did I get this far off course when trying to extol the whateverishness of Glen Plaid? I’ll get back to it but final thang about the Beatles’ strategy. History assigns its inception to their first manager, Brian Epstein. “Epstein took the raw energy of generational conflict and made it acceptable.” The caged heat at the Beatles' Shea Stadium concert offers evidence of their strategy's efficacy.
And let me also clear up something about the genesis of one of the names of this pattern. The Prince of Wales Check or Plaid. It’s been assigned to both Princes…later to become Edwards VII and VIII.
Some are more prone to assign it to the Duke of Windsor but Bertie wore it long before that little whippersnapper Nazi understudy took it on.
And others have worn it in fine form. Not the least of whom is my sartorial brother in peaked lapelled contrivances, fellow drummer Charlie Watts.
Oh, and I met up with Charlie the other day on Savile Row. I kid you not. 
I’ll write a proper story about it someday soon.
And here I am several decades ago in a somewhat tame version of the glen whatever pattern. Rather attenuated compared to my later fuzziness. Same with the woman.
“Oh no, ADG, punter of all things fuzzy, the ONLY version of this pattern that’s truly, authentically, artisanally, curitorially the Prince of Wales check is the blue/brown combination”.Well let me just head off at the pass you sartorially autodidactilated, no life, still living with your mama, smartass anonymous commenters. Save it. We don’t care. And by the way, that particular combination is the ugliest version in the line-up. Go ask mama for an advance on your allowance and get yourself an outfit made from this legacy version, ok? And be sure to ask for the Jethro Bodine, Thom Browne shrunk up pattern. It’ll be sick. Shut the ….
Bottom line is that the assignment of this pattern to either of the Princes of Wales, later Kings Edward has been wrong all along. Truth is that the pattern was named in honor of Prince’s 1978 Wales tour. Prince and his hoochie coochie retinue played forty-three concerts in twenty days. “It was my most rewarding tour” said Prince. “The travel time from one concert venue to the next was easy-peasy”. I still can’t believe that Prince actually said “easy-peasy”.
Ok, I’ve done my duty regarding sartorial subjects. Seems that this blog used to be about such things. But I now want to point you to Zeke Emanuel’s article in the Atlantic, Why I Hope toDie at 75. And please, if anything pisses you off (other than the aforementioned rant about the Prince of Wales pattern caca) to the point of wanting to rage against me with a comment, please read Zeke’s article first.

My mother has now been back in the ICU for a week. And  my brother and I this weekend—our fifty-seven year old sister, a critical care nurse by training, is too incapacitated amidst her own struggle with lupus to either come and help us or offer objective input—are discussing the discontinuation of antibiotics for my mother’s intractable infections and working out the logistics of getting her back in the home that she’s been running for fifty-one years—the last year, from a hospital bed in the den. Hospice and palliative care are the only tactics we are willing to now discuss.
This is my sister and me a year and a half ago...saying goodbye to our mom the first time. I'm tired of saying goodbye. And we know that we aren't special or unique in this journey with our mom. Thousands of other siblings are amidst the same right now, all over the world. But we are exhausted. My mother has been toying with death for a year and a half now. I’m tired to the bone and weary of this eighteen month roller coaster of emotional whack-a-mole. The toll that it’s taken on me, physically, spiritually, emotionally and financially is alarming. I’ve never been pulled in so many directions simultaneously by forces that are so intensely demanding. And the guilt associated with under delivering on each demand has been paralysing. (My reasons for using the British spelling for paralyzing are twofold. One is that I just returned from England. The other is in honor of those Americans who affect in their writing, some connection to England by using “colour” instead of “color” and say herb—like “Herb Alpert” instead of herb—like “urb”. Here’s the deal—unless you have at least on British parent or you went to school in England for more than one year, stop with the Anglo Sycophancy. I gave up the practice as soon as my Aunt Tootie and Roxanne Burgess called me on it. So now I’m calling you out. Stop it.) 
Ok, back to my mama. I say the guilt “has been” because I’m over it. At least I am trying to be. I didn’t drop everything this past week and run to South Carolina to participate in the vigil yet again. I can’t back burner my life here to do it this time. My mom and I are rock solid and she knows that I’ve been there in service to her as much as physically possible over this last year and a half. I’m suffering from sympathy fatigue and I’m exasperated at the thought of selecting the next appropriate emotional state to check into only to have the universe once again tell me that I’ve selected the wrong damn one. Again.

Modern medical interventions don’t always prolong life. They forestall death. And the interim between what was a decent quality of life and  the reaper’s rap on the door is a rather hellish stretch of ennui. Nobody loves their mother more than me and my sibs. But if we are brave enough to disentangle ourselves from the tentacles of maudlin sentiment, my sibs and I should without guilt, face up to the reality that our mom should have died a year ago.

Had we been citizens of Germany or several other very countries who offer better overall population based health management than we do in the States, my mother would have never survived the initial incident a year and a half ago. Why? Because independent of advanced directives, they would have never put a feeding tube down her nose. We don't do a good job of having healthy dialogue about end of life issues here in the States. We don't do death very well. Countries that have a euthanasia option utilize it, surprisingly to me, not that often. But what the option allows is the platform for more candid discussions regarding end of life decisions. I'm not advocating it for the States. I'm just saying that we need to rethink how we manage the life journey.
And I can’t tell you what a tempest of every describable emotion I’ve had to work through to be able to say out loud and put in print my belief that it would have been better if my mom had passed on back then. I’m getting nauseated just typing this even though I’m resolute in my opinion. Why? Because my mom and I have had some lovely and humbly instructive moments over the last eighteen months. Laughing, eating barbecue, reminiscing, being humbled—both of us as I’ve put her on and off the bedpan and wiped her. But the cost has been too high by any and every measure one could use to assess the upside.

I’ve been to church more times than most of you who read my stuff. So please—don’t offer me that ethereal hall pass/permission slip bullshit that supposedly gets us off the hook for having to answer such tough existential questions. “It’s just not in our hands, Dust. There are higher powers at work here and we as mere mortals won’t know why things play out like they do till we get there.”  Folks, it’s the god given tools and intellect that allow mere mortals to perpetuate in the name of humanity, this cowardly and discourteous end of life shepherding process so don’t hand me the bullshit about how we are not in control of this journey. Yes, you can believe in a higher power and not subjugate your common sense as a condition of belief. 

The shepherds, or at least the committee that wrote the Standard Operating Procedures for the end of life shepherding process, should be fired.  And if after this; my admonishment to you, the mind numbingly naive members of the doctrinally impertinent, you still insist on offering me solace along the god’s in control lines, I’ll drive to your house—I don’t care if you live in Outer Vulgaria—and deploy my pimp hand or maybe even a closed fist, right in your pie hole. Until you've wiped pee from the maternal conduit through which you emerged...until you've locked eyes with your mother while doing so and realized that in her eyes there's shame and in yours, embarrassment, don't even try to school me. I mean right now. I can hurt you.
Let me tell you, if anyone is going to get “there” it’s my mom. And five gets ten that both of her husbands and her eight brothers and sisters already in residence up “there” are going to say “What the hell took you so long?”And her answer should be… “Well I was more than ready eighteen months ago but the United States of America’s Medical Industrial Complex wasn’t quite yet finished fiddling with me, my wallet, and the physical-financial-spiritual reservoirs of my kids. Oh, but for all those costs, I was able to dictate to Dusty the recipes for his favorite things that I’ve cooked for him these last fifty years. And I taught him to make stove top white trash cornbread in a cast iron skillet. You know he always did love that. Oh, and the last time he was home we shelled butterbeans".
Yes I’m exhausted and frustrated and deciding whether or not to select door two or three of the bereavement-depression-letting go game. But either way, I’ll be wearing some kick ass socks.
Onward. Two  Glenurquhart adorned steps forward. Three back. And listening wholeheartedly to Zeke Emanuel.

ADG2



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She is Safety--She is Home

November 8, 2014, 7:38 am
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She is Home.  The source of our very essence.
We are born from either collaborative concept or randy capriciousness.
In three trimesters.
Conditions of our residence be damned. She’s our mother ship and safety is assured.
Always
Yet we are groomed for departure and encouraged to leave.  Healthy leaving sees our mother ship go from umbilical confine to swaddling base camp. You can always go home again.
But is base camp really home?
Forever allegiant and drawn back towards it. Circumstances dictate how often we return and how long we stay.
Intervals
The brevity or duration of our visits lessens not the value of our base camp returns. Nor the need to again return when we are too long away.  She is succour.
Tethers
Our earliest attempts ex base camp see us scrambling about on the lower slopes. Where the risk is low and she’s never out of eyesight and earshot.
Tentative
Ungainly but confident in our knowing. Not that our scrambling will improve but that she awaits us. Home. Our base camp. And for now to her we frequently return.
Ego
Ambition. Compelling Options. Wanderlust and Seduction. Skill and Achievement.
All bolster our willingness and ability to venture above the lower slopes. The higher we go the thinner the air and we allow ourselves to believe that this air is somehow rarefied.  Exclusive when it’s merely attenuated and less nourishing.
Hubris
Our worst self fails to see the scores of others all around us, eyeing the summit and poaching our rarefied air. The audacity to think it theirs.
The deceitful cocksurety of exclusive air carries us to even higher summits and makes home superfluous. Base camp unessential. You can never go home. Nor do you need to.
Prodigal
Yet we return. And she loves us and questions neither our impertinence nor the length of our absence. You can always go home. Our ego gives way to the reception of restorative love. Shelter without judgement. Lush oxygen. Base camp.
Untethered
Home’s permanence foreshadows base camp’s temporal utility. And we are forgiven for toggling her back and forth between the two. She was always there regardless of the construct.

But what are we to do?  To what do we return when both are gone? 
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