You look nice today. Something about your clothes allows you to exude poise and symmetry, the pattern of your scarf, perhaps. Maybe your skirt or blouse or boots, the way they speak to one another, but I can’t say for sure. Yes, I think you look nice today, very nice, and the reason it sounds awkward as I say it is because I’m not accustomed to venerating articles of clothing. When someone is wearing a really badass jacket, I might say “That jacket is really badass,” but your jacket, no offense, is quite maroon and ordinary. I don’t know, it’s just something kind to say to another person when they look nice, a compliment because I’m bored and have nothing of substance to contribute. I’m bored here. I’m bored here and now pay close attention to garments and their colors and patterns and material, their sleeves and collars and pockets, their lengths and cuts and buttons, and what other garment and color and pattern might compliment them.
This is not an isolated incident.
Just yesterday I remember removing a shirt and hanging it back in my closet because I didn’t like the way my forearms fit inside the sleeves. After ironing it and buttoning it and putting the shirt on, I walked into the bathroom to spit out mouthwash and as I spit it out realized I took offense to the way my forearms felt flimsy inside those stupid sleeves. I put it back in the closet and picked out another shirt and ironed it and buttoned it up and wore it. Sweet Christ, I am bored bored bored.
We are bored. We are bored, and thus this website exists.
You look very nice today, and because you do, we hope you bask in the aura of your carefully selected outfit and not expect a preachy or sanctimonious mission statement to occupy this space, this archaeological first-post-space, or for either of us to unroll our schematics for digital world domination, preceded by an epigram1. This is the first post here, but it is not that kind of first post. It is about you and how you look nice and how boredom often causes people to utter things they otherwise would never even fathom.
You look very nice today and that’s what this post is all about. Yes, it is about you and your lovely garments and how when you wear said garments you look nice, very nice. It is not about how we feel uncomfortable composing this first post — what to say, how to say it — how this exercise is the web-equivalent of a bar room pickup line, how we had to resist posting some State-of-the-Webspace type address where we might proclaim it our duty to deliver some profound message, to manifest our lofty intentions on a digital page. To manifest, on a digital page, our lofty intentions — of which of course we have zero, save for thwarting the minions of aforementioned boredom.
Where did you buy that scarf?
- Which would have been Byron’s “Most epic poets plunge in medias res / (Horace makes this the heroic turnpike road), / And then your hero tells, whene’er you please / What went before — by way of episode, / While seated after dinner at his ease, / Beside his mistress in some soft abode, / Palace, or garden, paradise, or cavern, / Which serves the happy couple for a tavern.” ↩
