I Miss My Pants, or Grab Those Khakis!

I am wearing pants that don’t fit.

Oh that’s right.

You want to know why?

I’ll tell you.

I’m wearing pants that don’t fit because all of my pants are gone.  That’s right kids.  I lost all my pants.

So…remember how I used to live in a tent?

Yeah. That ended badly.  The tent disappeared.  Or, if we want to be all grammatically accurate, it was disappeared.  Because it did not just vanish of its own accord, I suppose.

The thing is, the camp was being evicted.  And some people were “helping” others by taking down their tents and removing their personal belongs. I have some strong feelings on this topic, so I’m just going to take one giant step to the side and move right past that little mess and jump to me getting to camp and finding the tent gone.

And it was gone-gone.  Like without a trace gone.

At the time, I had a really strong emotional reaction to it.  Mostly because I seem to have really strong emotional reactions to most things these days.  But also because it felt like this symbolic loss of something I loved and cared about and didn’t get to say goodbye to.  I hadn’t spent the night before there, at the camp, because we were going to court the next day.  So to come back from court and find it, and most of the camp with it, gone was just devastating in this totally inexplicable way.  Because I really did live there.  It felt profoundly like home, which made it feel really painful and really personal and really fucking sad.

Plus all my shit was in it.  And I felt crazy guilty because it wasn’t my tent – it was someone else’s and a bunch of his shit was in it too.

Anyway, at the time, it was really the emotional loss that hit home.  My shit was gone, yes.  But I wasn’t really concerned about that stuff.  I was sad that my journal was gone.  I was sad that a bunch of stuff I had made and couldn’t replace or re-do was gone.  Mostly I was just sad about what was happening and that we had created an environment where something like that could happen.  Because in the month that I stayed there, I never once had a real problem with safety or security.  The worst that ever happened was the occasional swiping of our front tent peg.  So it seemed just like such a tragic way to end things.  And in light of all of that, and all of the sadness of losing a physical occupation, the day to day practical stuff seemed inconsequential.

It seemed inconsequential, that is, right up until I realized I have no pants and a severe shortage of underwear.  Because you know where that stuff lived?  In the freaking tent.

So today I’m wearing pants that don’t fit right.

I don’t look great, guys.

Also, if you happen to see a few pairs of khakis strewn about the SCCC lawn, grab them.  Those are mine.