Dress To Suppress

At the age of 38, I have come to the conclusion that I have no one to impress on a daily basis.  Unless I am looking to advance in my career or I am mandated by certain mores such as company dress code or acceptable for the event, I will dress mostly for comfort.  Now, granted, being a t-shirt designer, after work and on the weekends I’m liable to be wearing a tee I love or designed, which has a message or is used for marketing purposes.  In any case, the my morning goes like this.

I get up, shower, and then put on clothes that satisfy the following criteria: did I wear that shirt last week, and is it comfortable for the weather  Beyond that, I don’t put a lot of thought into the manner or style of dress.   However, if you were to ask the me that was 25 years  my junior, you’d get a vastly different answer.    There was no comfort involved.  It was dress to suppress.

Now, what does that mean?

Well, in the case of eight to ten year old me, I wore a good deal of hand me downs.    Being the youngest of three, by seven years, I was subjected to wearing the clothes my brother had from a previous decade.   Factor in that my parents didn’t have a huge bank account, I wore the same clothes for multiple years while they fit.

But at some point, I wised up.  I went to my mother and thanked her for my impeccable fashion sense but asked if my older brother could take me clothes shopping before the first day of 7^th grade.   In my town, you had K-6 (Grade School) in one building, 7-9 (Junior High) in another, and then 10-12 (High School) in yet another.   You see, the division in schools also determine the threat level to one’s psyche from their classmates.  In grade school, you could get away with wearing sweat pants, a ¾ sleeve baseball tee, and Sears’ brand Velcro running shoes without drawing attention.  However, in sixth grade the natives begin to take notice and you prepare yourself for the inevitable catty comments about how you dress and how you look to your peers.   So, I decided to keep that from happening and turned in my running shoes for Nike high tops, just so I could keep up with the pack.   Then, in the summer before Junior High, I went on that all important clothes shopping trip to the mall with my older and infinitely cooler brother.  I came back with Ocean Pacific and Shah Safari shirts, Bugle Boys and Dockers pants, a pair of Chuck Taylors and assorted shirts from 80s mega trendy stores like Chess King and Just Pants (I’m kidding).

That first day of school was all about blending in and not sticking out.  It wasn’t about the clothes drawing attention.   It was about disguising myself to look like the enemy.  That way I could infiltrate their ranks and they could see me, not what I wore.   In those days, if your parents got your clothes at stores like Gabriel Bros. or Montgomery Ward, you were an easy target.  The cool people could zone in on you like a geek seeking missile, claws bared, ready to attack your fashion.  It was survival of the fittest.

By when you reach High School, the claws retract somewhat.   The rules are more relaxed.  In Junior High, the bodies and minds of teenagers go completely nuts.  All the instability of hormones and growing fight your ability to be comfortable in your own skin, so you lash out at others as a way to justify your own metamorphoses from ugly caterpillar to butterfly.   In High School, you stop focusing on how to take others out of the race and work to getting to the finish line first with flare.  It’s called preparation for college.  Soon, you start to compare acceptance letters to schools like you did with shoes or earrings, years before.  It’s not about how you dress, it’s about how you will succeed in your post High School career.  Still, I did do my best to keep up and went the route of the Boyz II Men, Olive Garden waiter route with jeans, white button down shirts, and ties.  Some days loafers, some days sneakers.     But I never got called out by the worst offenders from Junior High when it came to my clothes.   I mean I caught a glimpse of it in sixth grade with my clothing.  In Junior High, there was that one disastrous pair of blood Red Pro Keds high tops that nearly destroyed me.  Luckily, the poorest of the poor kids had on Moon Boots and the geek seeking missiles locked onto him instead.

Funny how, when you get to college, all of that goes out the window and you end up wearing pajamas to class or sweats with a ball cap, and you’re just fine.  Sometimes you wonder if uniforms in the education system help to tone down bullying or other harassment of not so cool kids in those years.    My argument for that is to a kid going through all the agony of adolescence, their clothes should be a coat of arms for their individuality.  I wouldn’t bow to inappropriate or obscene clothing, but as a form of expression and a way to help that transition, clothes do make the man they will become.  Why suppress that?

I'd like a double tall, half caf, half foam, Mocha Choca lata ya ya....with a twist.

I remember being somewhere near the age of seven when I had my first sip of coffee. It was straight up black. I don't remember if my parents always drank their coffee this way. Perhaps this was an object lesson in keeping me away from the stuff. Either way, I wanted to do a Marx Brothers' spit take right then and there. I couldn't understand the allure of this elixir that most adults required an hourly intake of to function, normally. It couldn't have been the taste that attracted them to such a potation that puckered my puss. I was told that there is something called caffeine in coffee that gave its drinker the desired effect. "Caffeine?" I wondered. What the heck is that? My question was met with a simple answer, "a drug that gives you boosts of energy." Oh, I get it. My parents are Java Junkies. They've got a burro on their backs.

Ok, I embellished a little bit, there. Actually, my parents didn't drink that much coffee, but I still couldn't understand why they needed this pot of pick me up to get going. I had no trouble finding the energy to do something. Sometimes, I lacked the desire, but certainly not the energy. I could wake up in the morning, have my breakfast, and I was off and running all day long. Back then, in a forgotten time called the 80's, we kids did something that hasn't been tried for years. We played outdoors. We didn't have Playstations or iPods. We had Ataris and Walkmans which derived little enjoyment after an hour or two. We found enjoyment in playing outdoors. Whether it was a pickup game of football or baseball, we were gone all day long until the universal signal for returning home was sounded. That sound was the buzz of the street lights flickering on in the neighborhood. Some of us tested our parents resolve with this issue by playing at the edge of our yards after the incandescent glow of fluorescent bulbs shone as bugs repeatedly bounced into and around the polls. My point was that as children we did not have the need, nor did our parents have the desire for us, to consume coffee. We ran on pure, uncut youth, the kind that had an unbelievably high street value.


Flash-forward to about seven years later at the height of my adolescence, my brother, who was an additional seven years my senior, had been close to finishing up his Bachelors of Science at the University of Pittsburgh at the time. He had gone through a few phases in college during the transition between the 80's and the 90's. There was Kenny G and Dave Koz playing the soft soporific sounds of the saxophone, skiing at Seven Springs, cardigan sweaters, and The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. Yes, he actually bought paints and canvases and made happy little trees and clouds all over the place. He is quite talented. Now, as his younger brother, looking towards the elder male in the family to emulate and copy, I did everything he did. I wore Cosby Cardigans with turtle necks complete with French rolled Bugle Boy pants. I made copies of all his Kenny G and David Sanborn CDs....to which I made cheesy mix tapes for dates. Yes, I would drive to the movies in my parents Oldsmobile while blasting "Songbird" on the AC Delco radio with that special someone. Of course, most fads are just that, fads. In time, I opted for Faith No More, Guns and Roses, and Eric Johnson.

How to Pinch Roll, Peg, or French Roll your pants.

The Bad Sweater guy illustrates my point.



Bob Ross Products at Amazon.com

However, there was one fad that my brother introduced me to that stuck from that day forward. He began drinking coffee. Mind you, I was just starting high school in 1990 and the only association myself or my friends had at that time with the word Starbucks was from Battlestar Galactica (The original series with the guy from the A-Team) or the force fed reading of Moby Dick in English class. We had no idea that 3000 miles away an empire was being created. My brother had started bringing home these bags of premium flavored coffee. The bags were labeled as if they were brands of weed like Maui-Wowy or Appalachian Ass Kicker. There was French Vanilla, Suisse Mocha, and Hazelnut. Now, I'm not taking about those little cans from General Foods International. I'm talking about little bags from a coffee shop with ground up gold inside. I hesitated at first, remembering my experience from years before, but my brother introduced me to cream and sugar. Soon, I was looking to inject the stuff into my eyeballs. My world had suddenly gone from the sepia tones of Kansas to the blinding Technicolor palate of Oz. It wasn't that I even needed the caffeine, I just liked the taste. Within a year or so, he stopped buying those little bags of wonder and I started searching for replacements. I began putting vanilla extract in my coffee, and chocolate milk, anything to get that much needed flavor boost missing from regular old house blend. By the time I graduated in 1993, I had become a cappuccino fiend. I ingested coffee in every form imaginable. There was a brief instance where I loved these iced coffee drinks called Cappio. I drank them so often that, after awhile I became so turned off by them that I never touched the stuff again. Then the local mini marts like Sheetz and 7-11 started carrying these cappuccino machines that just mixed flavored power and hot water together. It was like the coffee version of crack, cheap and highly addictive. It was about this time that Starbucks finally made its presence felt in Western Pennsylvania. We had one single location on campus at The University of Pittsburgh. It was situated in the basement of the Cathedral of Learning and they accepted meal plan money. Oh, joy. I could have the high quality stuff and it was part of my college meal plan.

The Cathedral Learning

Well, here we are 19 years later and while I do not know if my brother still drinks coffee with the same amount fervor as he once did. I, myself, have been unable to completely kick the habit. As I graduated college and entered the workforce, I've been relying on coffee to keep me from snoring at my desk. However, like all good things in life, a good idea tends to become exploited. I've always been a little cheap when it comes to paying for expensive items and nowadays, Starbucks is a once in a while venture. I personally only ever order one thing there, Venti Caramel Macchiato with three Splendas. It's not because I am such a creature of habit that I only stick to one drink and never explore the menu, it's because I don't understand the culture or the terminology. The height of pretentiousness seems to be in ordering the size of your coffee in Italian and quite frankly we've gone a little nuts with the different types of preparation of the same drink. It's sad when I have to wear a wristband with all the vocabulary written on it as if I were a quarterback in the huddle trying to decide what play to run.

Starbucks ordering made easy

There are times I choose to take a break from coffee altogether. I tend to get a little cranky from the years and years of caffeine addiction and withdrawal can be such a bad thing. It sounds stupid, but my drink of choice in college was Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi. Once I acquired the taste of drinking diet there was no turning back. I also didn't want all the caffeine so I opted for the decaf brand. One particular week I had not been able to get decaf and was reduced to drinking the high test stuff. I quickly switched back to decaf with no step down plan and found myself in a Mongo like rage. A ridiculous and banal argument with my then girlfriend resulted in my shattering the windshield of my parents' beloved Oldsmobile. It was a fluke accident. I simply hit the windshield with my palm using very little force, however, my class ring which weighed about 19 pounds spider webbed the windshield and sent me into a no caffeine zone treatment program. It was quite a hard task to complete considering I don't know of any 12 step programs for caffeine addicts. Cheap adolescent theatrics aside, the withdrawal from caffeine was a symptom of a bigger problem and I moderated my caffeine intake and became a little more passive and Zen like.

Now that I am in my 30's and have a little one just starting out, I rely on coffee to get me through the mornings at work, but otherwise I lay off the caffeine at home. One day, perhaps, I will let my daughter try some coffee if she asks but I will do my best to keep her away from such vices that her mother and I were accustomed to partaking in when we were younger. I want to set an example by which childhood shouldn't be about gaming consoles and computer instant messaging. I want her to try and revitalize the playing outside movement. I want her to grow up healthy and buck the trend of adolescent obesity that has become rampant in her culture. Mostly, I want her out of the house for a few hours so I can sit and enjoy a cup of coffee in silence. As I approach middle age, I become the embodiment of Steven Keaton from Family Ties, warning my child about the dangers of capitalism and vice. I've turned into an 80's coffee burnout, the kind who drinks decaf coffee just for the taste and waxes nostalgic about the early days of Smooth Jazz and pegged pants.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to flip Duotones over to side two in my walkman, preferably before this paint dries on my happy mountain. Oh, and pass the flavored creamer, will ya? I'm jonesin' for a little French Vanilla.