Read Before Swiping

Read Before Swiping

A Poem by Brendan O'Connor
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I recently joined a dating site, but I've yet to receive any matches. I can't understand why...

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Name: Brendan
Age: 31
Location: Boston, MA
Seeking: Female

Profile:

For starters, I'm tall. Not like grotesquely tall or anything. Just tall. Additionally, I'm not short. But I guess that kinda goes without saying, huh? Good. Great. Well, against my better judgment, and likely to your dismay, I'm going to move on from talking about my height-- my apologies (Oh, come on! Don't tell me you honestly thought that just because I'm a man I wouldn't know? Ladies, ladies, you must not know just whom you're dealing with here; I'm wise to your ways. Need I say I've seen every episode, of every season, of "Sex and the City." -- seen them not one but twice! So, trust me when I say, that this fact-- this "secret" of your sex-- is no secret to me; I know damn well that to you height is second to none. I know that it is paramount and without equal in this cunning and insidious game of attraction... but I won't exploit this secret. No, I won't do that. Lest the nature of my principles and intent be called into queston, I'll refrain from further reference to the lavishly tall stature with which I've been blessed. For I assure you my intentions are nothinf short of pure.) Moving on...

As for some of my hobbies and interests, I really lov- Wait, wait wait! Before I forget, there's something I desperately need to get off my chest. Bear with me, it will only take but a second, I promise.

Over the past few days, with spring slowly unearthing itself from the hard, swollen earth, I've found myself at an existential quandary. Ive been questioning my purpose, my reason for being here, my happiness, and the balance between disenchantment and desire. April is the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot once reminded us, and so it is. Perhaps it's that, as the snows melt and the environmental carnage is revealed, we are ever reminded of death and decay, each of us assured of his own mortality and the cold hand of death that awaits him-- awaits us all. But spring is a promise, so we must wait, and watch. Watch as the rivers rise. Watch as April's showers cleanse the filthy earth and make way for May's flowers and the rebirth-- the spiritual immortality-- that gives us a Why to make bearable any How.

So check it out, right. In doing all this--examining my life, taking inventory, making sense, best I can, of the human condition-- I've come to establish some specific areas of my life that could stand to benefit from change-- both internally and externally. To wit I've been thinking lately that perhaps my load could be made lighter if one-- just one-- of the myriad and despicable garment retailers peddling in denim jeans throughout this city would only have sense enough to stock pants in a 33" inseam. I mean, really, is that so much to ask? Like, really? Well, apparently it is. And you can go find out for yourselves if you don't believe me. it's like tracking down Big Foot-- trying to find these pants. Or chancing on a Dunks' bathroom that is NOT in the process of facilitating some sort of nefarious economy-- just aint gonna happen.

So why the 33" inseam, you might be asking yourself; does 1" really justify such passion? To which I answer Yes. A resounding Yes. You see, the 32" length pants-- the gold standard, the toast of the market, the most ubiquitous size the world over-- time and again prove a trifle too short on legs like mine; while the 34" variety-- ostensibly the trouser of choice for those in the National Basketball Association-- force me to roll a cuff. Well, what's so wrong with that? What's so unfathomable about rolling a cuff, you now might be wondering. Well, truth told, it's not so much the physical action of rolling the cuff that so perturbes me-- nor is it the the feel or the constitution of it either, believe it or not; rather, it's something expoentially more abstract.

(Boy, have I digressed! You have my word that I'm just about to list my favorite summer blockbusters of all and the network television prograns I couldn't possiby live without; I only need to justify my point. Briefly too)

Okay, so It all began with the advent of commercial blue jeans, which occured in the mid-19th century, shortly after the immortal Levi Strauss touched down on American soil. At the age of 18, Strauss, the future dungaree baron and eventual household name, starved for opportunity under German rule, left behind his humble homestead in the Bavarian countryside to try his luck at seeing through that Old World pipe-dream to which countless a European has been driven: The forlorn venture into new lands where one hopelessly attempts to wrest his fresh start from out of the virgin earth. For Levi Strauss, of course, this risky gambit would prove not a pipe-dream at all; the virgin earth, in fact, would become the very dirt into which he'd sow his visionary seed, and lay claim to a roll of denim.

Incidentally, by the time Strauss's blue jeans had reached the masses in America, a national phenomenon was presently under way. It started principally amongst the progeny within the familes stationed at the lowest strata on America's socio-economic hierarchy: the rural and lower-income households. It was here that the propensity for passing down clothes was greatest-- especially with respect to blue jeans. They would travel, almost entirely irrespective or wear, from sibling to sibling, and on from one generation to the next, and so on (practically ad infinitum, should the moths allow it). It was this is act of perennial reuse (an ostensible product of poverty) that singularly paved the way for the inception of history's truly forgotten Catastrophe: the great pandemic problem of kids and young adults forced into ill-fitting pantaloons.

To make-do during these hard and tiresome times, families often rallied around one another in times of strife and spiritual malaise. For instance, it became something of a ritual when it came time in a boy's life that he was to be handed down his new pair of jeans (which is to say, that while the jeans might've been brand-spanking-new to him, they were, in no uncertain terms, inconceivably old and threadbare in respect to there condition). At these rituals whole family would gather and watch as the ceremonial dressing took place. And then, following the fitting, and nothwithstanding the outcome-- whether the pants had fit like Cinderella's slipper, or had barely squeezed on like O.J.'s glove-- a boy was expected to remain poised no matter what. He was expected to accept his lot with the stoic resolve one might expect to find on a deceased captain-- still standing in the bowels of his ship, five fathoms beneath the waves that felled her. And last he was expected to remain ever grateful, and should he find one day, that his gratitude's begun to yield, he need only think of Adam and how upon his exile from Eden he must've been something grateful for even the fig leaf-- small as it was, it spared him the horror and the shame of having his nakedness put on display before the eyes of all the evil that lay await in the land beyond.

Following these rituals, matters were handled with far more practicality and action. If his jeans were too short, for instance, he might take to clam digging. If his pants were too tight at the waist he might work on cutting out (much to his chagrin) the cream tarts and raisin cake from his diet. However, when it came to pants that were just too long-- why, this was news to be received with much merriment and mighty good humor, for such a predicament as this could be amended by the painless albeit hideously distasteful institution of the ad hoc alteration which called for a cuff being rolled (and perhaps pinned, but NEVER hemmed) at the bottmom of each pantleg, much in the vein we see today.

By and by, as conditions improved nationaly-- with the industrial revolution paving way for more affordable garments, and the 20th century seeing an almost complete eradication of the sadly overlooked, and all but forgotten, Great Pantaloons Pandemic (come to think of it, such a malicious neglect of basic human decency would've doubtless had the social justice warriors up in arms, had they been around back then)-- eventually the rolled cuff no longer signified a systematic assault on the poor, and their right to good taste and style, but came to represent a different beast all together. Absurd as it may sound, modern times have witnessed the trending of a style not at all unlike the rolled cuff of old. Not surprisingly, this trend, this fad, has been subject to more caprice and passing whims than any other trend in recent history. One day it's the greasers, the next it's towheaded toddlers in Oshkosh B'Gosh 0overalls. And today? Just take one walk around Harvard Sqare and I guarantee you'll be hard pressed to find one alley, shop, or veranda where for every one girl wearing a Canada Goose jacket there's not three guys in view whose cuffs aren't rolled. And the icing on the cake is that those guys, the ones whose wardrobes are governed by the absurdity of this trend, well, one's a hipster, one's a yuppy, and one's a gutter-punk). I couldn't make this stuff up.

While we're still on the topic (I know, I know: I promise you, I'm just about to get to my hobbies and pastimess-- a minute more, I swear), I bet those brutes-- you know who, you know exactly which brutes I mean: that motley crew of every ilk of reprobate that Cambridge has to offer... the ones down in Central Square who speak exclusively (and unironically) in the Elizabethan tongue; who religiously sport that lavishly baroque style of vest that briefly fell in and out of vogue around turn-of-the-century Copenhagen, and whose financial responsibilities are met, in part, by the proceeds they gross at the dubious low-limit bridge parlor they run, swindling old ladies out of their ever depleting Social Security funds-- well, these brutes, these blackgaurds, they conform with militant infallibility to a code of dress that demands their cuffs be rolled not once, not twice, but three times! Yeah, your heard right--three times! I know, the travesty! Those scoundrels! What's more, I wouldn't doubt this demented prediliction of theirs-- this blatant assault on not just style but at all this is good and sound in the world today-- I wouldn't doubt it's what keeps the steak on the table for those fat-cats churning out 34" length pants like we're a Goddamm planet of Conan O'Briens and Maria Sharipovas.

But like I said, Im tall, but at 6'3", I'm not grotesquely tall or anything. But moving on...

In my free time I like t

(Character-limit reached)

© 2018 Brendan O'Connor


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Added on April 8, 2018
Last Updated on April 8, 2018
Tags: Dating, love, tinder, match, parody, satire

Author

Brendan O'Connor
Brendan O'Connor

Boston, MA



About
31 years old Boston, MA UMass Boston, BA English Former Heroin Addict & Felon Saved by literature more..