If You Want Dignity, Choose Chess

I've been bicycling for a long time. Lots of things have changed. For instance, fifty years ago, people bought components for their beloved bikes designed to shave a few grams off the weight, even though it would be a lot less expensive to just take it off their thighs. Now, bicycles are made out of some kind of miracle metal where the atoms are so far apart that the whole thing wouldn't tip a scale against a bag of chips.

Also, modern bike saddles have some cush in them and are no longer made out of pterosaur clavicles.

Plus, people have helmets now, and stuff. They're made out of old ice coolers, but they're better than nothing, which was the style helmet I wore for the first 35 years.

Old-timers like to make fun of this sort of thing. What a bunch of sissies. We did just fine without all that guff, they say. Old-timers love to say "guff." Of course, the ones that didn't do so fine are no longer with us.

One time, our old beloved Hostel Club group went off for a week-long tour in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, the home of zero cars and food bigger than your head. A couple of our friends put on strappy little leather helmets and toeclips and raced each other to Pennsylvania. From Virginia. They loaded up on salt tablets, because that was a thing then. We were already there, transported by motor vehicle as Nature intended, just in time to see them race up side by side, blast into the parking lot with a spray of gravel, lean over, and vomit copiously on their shoes.

If dignity were the goal in life, this did not appear to be the activity to get into. Naturally, we got into it.

The toeclips distinguished the serious biker from the hobbyist. They were little cages for your feet, and you jammed your toes in them, reached down, and cinched up the leather strap. With your feet locked in, you could really move. Problem. A moment of inattention while you're locked into your pedals, and you will go over like a dead dinosaur. It will look very majestic: no struggle, no fuss, no flailing, just your inert body, tied to a stake named Gravity. Modern bicyclists have abandoned the toe cages for a system wherein their shoes are locked into the pedals. You're supposed to click out of your pedals easily, but it doesn't always happen. Also, it is possible--I hear--to come up to a stop, click off one pedal, and lean the other way. Everyone's done it at least once. Lance Armstrong has done it too, I assure you, but he cleated all the witnesses. He stomped them into amnesia or worse.

So that's one way to efficient your way into a case of "road rash," or the transfer of all or part of your epidermis to pavement. I have never had a bad case of it, because no matter what I do, the road beneath my wheels doesn't go by all that fast. And if I get going down a mountain where my friends will gleefully reach speeds of up to 55 miles per hour, I will show up at the bottom considerably later, and my forearms will burst into flame from braking.

Clothing is different also. Seems to me my serious biking friends in the '60s wore wool shorts and tee-shirts. Now you are expected to deck yourself out in Spandex. It's not attractive. I don't care who you are. You're going to look like a bunch of link sausages in Technicolor.

The Spandex, at least, makes a certain amount of sense, and reduces chafing, but does not solve all the problems in the shorts region. On one long trip, I emerged from the porta-potty with a distinctive hitch in my git-along and eased myself back in the saddle. A woman rode up to me and said, quietly, medicated diaper powder, and then rode off before I could thank her.

I submit that if the first words from a complete stranger include "diaper powder," you are not engaged in a dignified activity.

Snakes On A Plane

A man was apprehended recently trying to board a plane with several snakes and three tortoises in his pants. Officials were tipped off when the x-ray equipment revealed a surplus of spines. There's no mystery about why a man would do such a thing. He carries tortoises in his pants because mice are too fidgety, and he carries snakes in his pants because they are too large to fit in a four-ounce container. Nor is there a question why the perps in these cases are invariably men. There isn't a woman in America who would attempt such a dastardly deed. We don't have the pants for it.

Pants perform entirely different functions for men and women. Men's pants permit them to appear in public while concealing random peregrinations of the penis. There is always room in their trousers to hang their personal scratchable items as well as perform actual scratching. This much space affords ample temporary shelter for a fleet of reptiles and maybe the terrarium they came in.

Women's pants, on the other hand, function strictly as butt and belly containment vessels. They are fully occupied and you couldn't slide a greased skink in sideways. If at any point we do develop some atmosphere in our pants, we've got a pair of skinny jeans on the shelf waiting to pick up the slack. No one is able to throw away the skinny jeans, which remain neatly folded as a symbol of hope. They are stacked in strata upon previously retired skinny jeans, where climatologists of the future will be able to core them for samples of antique air.

It's a crapshoot whether the skinny jeans will have swung back into fashion when they are finally deployed. I lost weight recently and discovered that my skinny jeans are now known as mom jeans, designed for maximum containment. The high-waisted jean is the gold standard of flesh corrals. Many of your major organs and their adipose insulation can be safely impounded in them and any escapee flesh is neatly covered by the bra and contents, which snap right over the top like Tupperware.

Conceivably a woman could shelter reptiles by wearing 100% Spandex pants, except that they would make a trio of tortoises look like roaming boils. Stretch pants did exist when I was young, but they were for older women with beehives, afternoon martinis and a cigarette cough. We teenagers wore pants with no give at all. We winched them up as far as we could by rocking back and forth and then had to lie down on our beds to seal the deal, rolling off sideways because our pants had taken the bend out of us. If we did tip over, we'd go down like a plank. It didn't look too bad. These were the days before kids were routinely infused with corn syrup from infancy. And we didn't realize it was uncomfortable because we had nothing to compare it to.

Except for a brief decade with pleated-front trousers, which we also managed to fill up, nothing has changed. My most recent trip to a store revealed racks of jeans that could rub the fuzz off a pipe-cleaner person. They don't leave room for a mosquito bite.

The truth about the airport incident is that there is a nasty, lucrative trade in exotic pets and some men will do anything to get that money. A woman would never stoop that low. Stooping is problematic anyway, and we only got room for bacteria and yeast.

Flyer, Flyer, Pants On Fire

It's hard to work up a heap of sympathy for your average suicide bomber, but I felt a twinge for the fellow who failed to detonate his underpants on that flight into Detroit. If I were planning to go out in a blaze of glory, I wouldn't want my underpants to survive me, either. And don't think it couldn't happen. On New Year's Day a few decades ago here in Portland, a fellow opened up the gas line to his house and blew it to smithereens. I was two miles away, and it was still the loudest sound I'd ever heard. There was nothing left of his house but the mortgage, and he took out the neighbors' houses, too, but there he was, dead in his yard, fully intact in his underpants. They probably weren't even riding up.

I don't think men's underpants do ride up. I never see men making an adjustment or anything. Oh, they may fiddle around in there, but it's always the package they're fiddling with, not the wrapping. A female suicide bomber would have been a complete success. If we were supposed to add a liquid to the explosive powder in our underpants, we could do that during tea with the Queen and no one would ever know. Every day requires dozens of such surreptitious adjustments. We've got it down.

As a letter carrier, I had to slide out of the tall driver's seat onto the pavement all day long, and the entire right side of my underpants disappeared every time. It only took a few steps to arrange my satchel as a shield and perform the extraction, with no one the wiser.

Then I'd start walking my beat, and my recently-thwarted underpants would get bored and irritable. So they would scout out the territory until, within a block, they had located the exact largest circumference on my ass, and then they'd settle in and make a nice indentation to flag the spot, because they did not yet have sequin-and-flashing-lights technology. There they would remain, snug as the Tropic of Capricorn, with all of Brazil pooching out to the north. You can tug them back to the equator and make it look like you're just stretching your back, but you'll be doing it all day long.

Women of a certain age that is not mine wear the thong, in part, to avoid this particular constriction. Well, if that ain't like curing insomnia with a whack upside the head, I don't know what is. A deliberate wedgie is still a wedgie. No thank you, Junior. It's hard enough taking my clothes off some days without having to excavate.

To really put the cherry on top of the whole underwear experience, though, you must add tights. Tights are sold in a variety of sizes, none of them mine. I am parked on the cusp, and my choices are to tuck the tights under my bra and watch them puddle up at the ankles, or get the ones that come out of the dryer eighteen inches long and fit like a sausage casing.

There is, however, no avoiding "control-top" hose, even if you were not planning to ask anything of your underwear you do not ask of yourself. Control-top hose contains Spandex, a synthetic fiber developed by bored and irritable Nazis. The function of the Spandex is to round up fat wherever it is hiding and shoot it out the top of the hose. The effect is that of a billowing flesh fountain on a nylon pedestal, and gosh--ain't that the look we were going for, ladies? Comfy, too. It takes five minutes to argue them all the way up to your waist, but sadly, fifteen minutes later, the tights have retreated to new ground quite a bit south of ideal. Enforcing a waddling gait, the crotch is now hanging six inches below your own, and no, you have nothing to fill that space up with. Not unless you have explosive powder.