Pants and Paint: Not Normally Friends (or Behold the Birth of a Hero, Part III)

Hoo, boy, quite the election commercials popping up lately. I'll get to those another time; the election is May 22nd, so these ads obviously won't be disappearing for a while yet.

What could be a more pressing topic of discussion for me than the new batch of I-am-good smilefests and he-is-bad scowlathons? Why, pants, of course! Ha ha! Humour me!

I start at another temp position tomorrow; it's at Investors Group again, so once again there probably isn't a whole lot I'm able to share about the job besides that. Man, it's going be nice to be working again! (I need money pretty badly.)

So this development, plus the general idea of spring cleaning, led me to tear through my closet and once again figure out what I have in my limited wardrobe that A) counts as 'business casual' and B) still fits me.

Pants usually have the hardest time staying alive for me, probably because I always buy the cheapest pants available (no surprise, of course -- I live in Winnipeg), so I never have very many pairs at any time; some shrink in the wash despite their own label instructions, some fall apart from old age, one pair this time around had a giant hole clean through the knee where they caught on a screen door, and this particularly unfortunate pair got splattered with car paint a couple of weeks ago.



Man, I really liked that pair, too. At 6'3'', it's always frustrating to walk into any store and try to find pants; racks from perimeter to perimeter are filled with 28- and 30-length pants, which are effectively shorts to me. And big-and-tall stores, when they do have the 'tall' sizes rather than the 'big' sizes, tend to price their cheapest pants at $65 -- which, after tax, is more than I spent on the bus pass for this upcoming month. (A bus pass that I need so that I can get to work in the first place, mind you, unless I'd rather spend four hours of each day walking to work and back. In my nice pants.)

So when I do find pants long enough, and when I find said pants on sale for lowball prices, I consider it a streak of luck on par with a lottery ticket being struck by lightning. These pants cost me five dollars off a Warehouse One discount rack, which I recall being about thirty or fourty dollars below their original asking price.

And I got paint on them. Because I am a champion.

But I am not easily dissuaded! The paint only ended up on one side, so upon finding them again today I did what anyone else might do; I grabbed the paint I'd hit them with before and turned a ruined pair of pants into a demented artwork experiment.



I stared at the original paint markings for a couple seconds, thought to myself that the biggest one looked a little like a seagull, then ultimately threw paint on 'em until they looked like a crude picture of Manitoba.

That accomplished, the rest of the leg came pretty naturally.



Yes, that reads 'Ghettopeg'; the name popped into my head one day a couple of years ago, and I couldn't think of a reason why it didn't fit, so I've held onto it ever since.



Altering clothing to my own unique designs? That's right -- I'm counterculture! And not just a guy who goes to stubbornly great lengths to continue wearing pants that he got paint on!

These, obviously, will not be the pants I wear to work tomorrow -- I am certain that they are not business casual -- but since I'm becoming increasingly determined about getting out and busking downtown for my own entertainment (and in a future post I'll go on for a bit about the idea), I don't see why I can't get an outfit going. Hell, if I'll be wearing a lucha mask anyway, what's one more article of attire that will throw people off?

A shirt, a mask and now a pair of pants; I swear I did not originally intend for this to be a novelty clothing blog! Not my original plan! Honest!