I had to give a speech at a senior citizen home recently. I get a little nervous about public speaking, so someone told me that in order to relax I should just imagine the audience in their underwear. What kind of advice is that? I spend most of my time trying not to picture the elderly in their underwear. I'm not going out of my way to imagine it now, especially while I'm trying to give a speech.
The older they get, all men start wearing their underwear more often in public. Especially fathers. I go over to my friend's house, and his Dad is always just lounging around in his underwear. It's like being in some late night Cinemax porn movie, except with a cast of only 50-year-old flabby men.
Overall, though, I think I'd prefer just wearing underwear around than wearing sweat pants. There's something about sweat pants that I don't like. I think it's the fact that they actually have the word "sweat" in the name of the pants. It's like wearing pants named after B.O. Sweat pants, sweat shirts, sweat socks ... who's sweating that much? And now there's a whole line of casual sweat apparel, for the times when you're just relaxing and sweating at the same time. There's nothing like lounging around the house to work up a good total-body sweat.
They should think about changing the name; that would help a lot. Instead of sweat pants call them Perspiration Pants. It has more of a refined sound to it. You could wear your Perspiration Pants to the luncheon or the cricket match. At least they call them sweat pants rather then sweaty pants, because that would imply they were pre-sweated before you bought them.
Actually, about the only time I wear sweat pants is to bed. I'm not a sleep-in-the-nude type of guy. I do like the word "nude," though. I like it because Nude is also a specific color of Crayola Crayon; it's sort of an off-white yellow color. The crayon actually has the word "nude" printed right on it. Every person I drew was always nude. The crayon people should forget being polite and instead of "nude," just admit that they really want to give the crayon a title like, "The Butt-Naked Color Crayon."
That's what I liked most about Crayola Crayons, that they all had long and beautiful titles for their different colors. Sea Mist Blue, Sunset Over Spain Amber, Dew Covered Grass Green, all printed right on the crayon. They never had any crayons with names like Varicose Vein Purple. Little kids fighting over who gets to use the different colors, "Hey, that's my 'Fat Bald-Headed Man Pasty White,' it's your turn to use 'Slutty Lipstick Red' now."
Another thing I remember about being a little kid was going on those little automated electronic rides that were sometimes outside of shopping malls. You know the rides I mean? You'd pay a quarter and sit on this little plastic horse that would bob up and down for five minutes. I never really liked those. All that jiggling up and down -- it's too much like weird unproductive sex. Maybe if I wasn't sitting on a horse during all the jiggling it wouldn't freak me out as much. I'm eight years old, jiggling up and down on a plastic horse in front of a shopping mall thinking, "I'm going to need therapy for years to straighten this out."
I was a Cub Scout too when I was a kid. I liked being in the Cub Scouts, except there were always kids who were just a little too good at scouting. I'm working on my Cooking Merit Badge; I look over and the guy next to me is just finishing his AIDS Research Merit Badge. I was so lost -- forget Cub Scout, Bear Scout, Wolf Scout, I was more like Dazed Chimpanzee Scout.
I think back then I was just killing time until I got to be old enough to enter the tight-white-underwear-lounging phase of my life. Only now do I realize all the hard work and dedication -- the chest hair, the bald head, the beer belly -- I've still got a long way to go before I can begin wearing just my briefs around the house. When I finally do reach that stage, I'll still have the most important phase of life left, the retirement years blue-polyester-pants-golf-cart-riding age. Only when I'm wearing white plastic-looking shoes and on a golf course in Florida will I have realized my true potential for greatness.
