Scuffing

So, I bought a new coat yesterday. As diligent readers will recall, my old one had been ingloriously nabbed from the back of a pickup truck in Oakland, and since then I have spent at least ten minutes per day disinterestedly entering and exiting stores near NYU looking for something to keep out the chill, failing mostly and relying without much success on old holey fleeces and layered sweaters instead. I finally found one yesterday. This new coat is eeriely similar to the last--a light corduroy short jacket with a faux shearling collar--with the exception of minute changes (to my chagrin: no epaulettes, deeper pockets, fumbly buttons) that I loathe but that Laura thinks makes me look "more classic," which I read as "less grotesque."

I felt pinches of disappointed self-discovery when, after the first day of fruitless hunting, I realized that I was just pursuing my old jacket and was still imagining scenarios for its return to me--maybe under a dumpster here? Maybe the Oakland police? Maybe it'll be swept up in a Bay Area updraft and carried by a flock of migratory birds to the East Coast, where a hot gust of gulf stream will startle the birds, who will serendipitously drop my old coat into my arms as I hold them out in coat-desiring prayer? Stupid, vain, unimportant thoughts. Here the regular host of anti-consumerist messages crowds into my superego and stomps around: why buy new things when used things abound and new things are crafted by the supple fingers of enslaved Asian children who make $.001 for every $35 the manufacturer makes and shipped by ununionized workers and stocked by the unhappy urban poor and the UHO folks ringing the bell outside the store doesn't get my money but this cordoruy jacket gets a bunch; why join the pre-Thanksgiving throngs on 34th Street, why put myself among the ranks of those folks who, on the subway ride uptown, comb jewelry catalogues pointing to the fistfuls of stripmined monopoly diamonds they wanted to stud their teeth with, why give a damn about the way this jacket looks or feels or keeps or doesn't keep out the cold? And more metaphysically, why desire material things? And why hold onto lost things?

All those questions were quieted by the Big Broom of Capitalistic Fervor, which swept out every dirty kernel of these thoughts in favor of more pleasant thoughts, like the smoove holiday jazz playing in Old Navy, or the artificial watermelon scents emanating from the Body Shop, and I got my jacket anyway and laughed my way to the bank. But the hand of God also strikes with perfect comedic timing. A little later, while biking in a frenzy to the South Bronx to see friends and the cutest, smartest, friendliest punk rock 2.75 year-old ever, I rolled over a plastic bottle and went flying onto 114th Street. No, no, that's too magnificient. I was neither biking in a frenzy nor flying. What I was actually doing was slowing to a stop a 114th and Lenox when I ran over the bottle, watched in slo-mo my tire sweep sharply to the left, attempted in vain to put down my foot, fell anyway, thudded onto my elbow and rolled onto my shoulder on the asphalt. The dozen or so teenagers standing fifteen feet away from me offered assistance in the form of comforting exhortations, including "HA HA! HA HA HA HA!" and "AHHHH HA HA HA!" In classic nerdery, I bolted upright, said something blustery, patted my pocket protectors, checked my tail and headlights and biked away with my face burning in shame.

I didn't check my body until I got to Amy's. I was perfectly fine. My jacket and gloves absorbed most of the fall. Skin was neither broken nor bruised. The jacket was scuffed but that only added to my [butch] authenticity. My bike is making funny noises, but then again, it's always made funny noises. God bless winter spills.