No more new jeans

On the advice of my wife, I went this week to the mall looking for a new pair of jeans. I have lost a fair amount of weight over the last year, mostly because of eating breakfasts and lunches that consist of only the food left behind by my two- and five-year-olds. If my wife didn't come home and feed me at dinner time, I suspect I would look like an Olsen twin with a beard. I'm now six foot two, a hundred and eighty-three pounds, which means that I have only just now, according to the universally accepted Body Mass Index, reached 'healthy'. So my jeans are a little loose now, and my wife suggested that I should buy a new pair, presumably something more flattering to my butt. Or perhaps a pair that makes me look like I might actually have a butt in there somewhere.



At the mall, I went to several teenager-infested stores with salesclerks with piercings and visible tattoos, and felt old. That doesn't really bother me, when I was a teenager I thought that people who were as old as I am now got their first jobs waiting tables at the Last Supper. So fine, I'm old, I can deal with that. What I can't deal with is that it seems there are no new jeans in existence. All the jeans that are for sale now look as if they have been picked off the carcasses of recently deceased homeless people, because apparently the style is now "distressed", which means "looking as though they have spent five months in a logging camp or commune and were washed once before coming to the store to be resold".



So I came home jeans-less, and I got onto the Internet to find out where all the NEW jeans are, and I discovered a very disturbing fact: no new jeans have been produced since 1995. See, jeans are made of denim, which we get from Denim Buffalo, who were originally discovered by miners near San Francisco in 1835. The great Denim Buffalo herds provided all the denim needed until the California Gold Rush, during which time the herds were decimated and driven north into the mountains in Washington. There they flourished, and their numbers were approaching healthy levels again, until the grunge music movement started in Seattle, and denim was once again required to meet an insatiable demand for clothes from disenfranchised slackers who had no problem with spending upwards of $90 on a pair of jeans and $6 for coffee. The great denim herds were hunted to extinction, the last one being killed to make a bathmat for the floor of Eddie Vedder's tour bus. This fate was very nearly shared by the flannelbeast, whose ranks were driven to the brink by overhunting until only a few specimens remain that are now kept in zoos. A breeding program is in place to try to revive the species, but there is a problem, as it seems that all the flannelbeasts in captivity appear to be lesbians.

So it looks like there will be no new jeans for me. However, on the bright side, it looks like I can sell all my OLD jeans back to stores and recoup my investment. Some of them even already have holes in them. Maybe if I wear them a few more weeks, I could even be 'cool'. Except that I have no butt.

Thanks for reading!