Skinny jeans

I heard a co-worker the other day talking about buying some “skinny jeans.”

I asked her what those are, and she said they are jeans that make you look skinny. Wow, I thought. That’s pretty awesome. What kind of voodoo magic is that? And where can I get a pair?

But she told me that they aren’t for men, only women. That doesn’t seem fair. Don’t I have the right to look skinny in a pair of jeans?

Then the more I got to thinking about it, I realized I probably don’t want to wear skinny jeans. For one thing, they are bound to be tight, and I don’t wear tight things. I hate being constrained. I’m the kind of guy who unsnaps his pants after a big meal, which causes quite a furor in the catfish restaurant.

I will stick with my “relaxed fit” jeans, which are the greatest invention for middle-aged men since the recliner. I don’t know who came up with this idea, but he or she is a genius. We all know who Eli Whitney and Robert Fulton were, but when’s the last time you used a cotton gin or rode on a steamboat? And yet the inventor of relaxed fit jeans lives in obscurity. Don’t seem right.

Like many men my age, I fight the battle of the bulge. Well, OK, I don’t really fight it, but I think about fighting it. Just the other night, as I watched a football game and looked down at the empty bag of barbecue potato chips at my side, I said to myself, I gotta do something.

So I brushed all the crumbs off my shirt, finished off my beer, and went upstairs to come up with a plan of action. Then I saw my bedroom, and I figured I didn’t want to tackle a drastic life-change like that without the benefit of a good night’s sleep, Luckily, when I woke up, I had forgotten the whole thing.

I don’t really want to get skinny, I just want to avoid getting too fat. I’ve been wearing 34-waist pants for about 20 years and I don’t want to move up to 36. That would be admitting defeat, plus I would have to buy a whole new wardrobe, and I don’t buy clothes. I make an annual sojourn to a place called The Sock Shoppe down in Griffin to stock up on socks, T-shirts and boxers, and then I hope I get a couple of pairs of pants for Christmas, and that’s about it.

My wife and daughter have made a couple of attempts to spice up my wardrobe, but I have resisted. My wife is currently threatening to buy me a white linen shirt with some sort of embroidery on the front of it. She said it looks like something they wear in Mexico. That’s exactly what I want at this stage of my life, to look like Ricardo Montalban.

But back to the weight issue. I suppose there are many options out there to consider. Sadly, they all include eating less food, and that’s a big stumbling block. There’s no magic pill. I remember not long ago reading about some fat-blocking pill that allegedly worked, but it also caused “anal leakage.” There’s a word combination you never want to see.

And diets? They’re too restrictive. Almost all of them prohibit you from eating large amounts of cheddar cheese, and that, I can’t abide. I used to work with an older guy at a newspaper, and one day a shapely advertising girl walked through the newsroom, and he stood up and said, “Boys, if I ever get too old to want that, I want y’all to kill me.” That’s how I feel about cheese.

So I guess I’ll just exercise a little more, skip the late-night potato chips, avoid Little Debbie snack cakes, and before you know it my size 34 relaxed fit jeans will be comfortable again, and I keep them snapped even after dinner. The waitresses at the catfish place will thank me.