In Which I Go Insane
This month marks ten years since I began to go insane. I’d always preferred to dress somewhat more formally than my peers, and indeed during my first semester at Austin College I tended to wear slacks and a button-down shirt (this at a time & place when jeans & t-shirts were the norm), but then I went home for Christmas and my parents gave me a choice: I could get a stereo or a coat from Brooks Brothers. What self-respecting young man wouldn’t go for the coat?
I returned to school for my first JanTerm; that year I took a month-long intensive course in J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth writings (taught by Prof. Bill Moore, a fairly old-school professor). So I owned a tweed coat, it was grey & blustery, I had several pipes and I was studying Tolkien: no-one needed to draw me a diagramme. And so I started to wear coat, tie & sweater-vest. It was a blast: walking across the quad on a cold January morning, smoke streaming from my pipe, looking forward to another day of musty old Oxford dons—add in the fact that the girl I thought the finest in all the world was in the same class, and life was pretty much perfect.
And thus began my long sojourn in the land of the mildly deranged. For the next three and a half years I was the guy in the coat & tie. I loved it, pointing out that I was the real non-conformist; after all, if everyone else is wearing rainbow tie-dyed shirts then they’re hardly radical, are they? That’s quite true; what I’d not realised is that no-one should want to be different; it’s the normal guys who get girlfriends, the non-eccentrics who advance in the world. It wasn’t until I’d graduated and been working for a few years that I quit the coat & tie thing, too late to have any real understanding of style. Oh well.
Incidentally, if you’ve never had the chance to study Tolkien on a grey day, wearing a tweed coat with a pouch in one pocket and a tamper in the other, a tie on your neck, a sweater over that and a pipe twixt your teeth—you really haven’t lived yet. It is more than cool.
