I haven't been on my usual computer as of late, due to some motherboard issues, but the good folks at Dell took their sweet, let's-schedule-two-appointments-instead-of-one-even-though-both-appointments-took-less-than-fifteen-minutes-apiece time and got it fixed. So this is from my journal (with a few portions rewritten, or otherwise revised), but seems pertinent to my overall person and development as one.
I went to the Barneys Warehouse Sale today. In Fort Mason. I walked from the Embarcadero to Fort Mason. Which wasn't so awful. What was awful was walking from Fort Mason to AT&T Park. That took a fucking hour of skin burning, melanoma creating walking. But it's my fault for not wearing sunscreen and choosing to walk along the Embarcadero, instead of cutting through the city. My genius will be well-documented for future generations.
In any case, I made it to the Barneys Warehouse Sale, which is to say I made it to discount retail heaven. At some point in this blog, I’m going to need a camera, but I’d much rather spend my money on these.
This poses a wee conundrum, as I can’t properly document all I do (and eat and buy) without a camera, but for now, maybe it’s for the best that you don’t see all that I eat. Because it’s a lot.
I keep straying. BACK AT THE SALE , it’s in a warehouse, as the name would suggest. Which means: No dressing rooms, ergo, lots of people in their skivvies. As I doffed my pants in favor of a pair of Balenciaga red resin-coated jeans, a man offered up his blue nylon coat and asked if he should buy it. This began a three minute conversation, wherein I, the Good Samaritan, kindly advised him, the Pathetic Sloven, that he shouldn’t buy anything he isn’t going to wear. Just an almost-adult talking to a slightly eccentric middle aged man. It’s San Francisco, the rich eccentric are everywhere.
Well, as you may have guessed, this short, bald, middle aged doof wasn’t so much eccentric as wanting to cornhole me. I didn’t catch on until maybe twenty minutes later, just when I had reached the cashier, just when he hunted me down and gave me his card, just when he told me to call him, since I had such a nice smile.
I immediately wretched. My stomach turned inside-out on itself. My hands shook and I knew that if I didn’t bite my lip, I’d have the San Francisco Barneys Warehouse Sale to add my list of public emotional breakdown locales. So I promptly paid for my goods and hightailed it out of the warehouse, out of Fort Mason, trying in vain to escape any shame and disgust I felt.
I had never before felt so objectified. It wasn’t so much outraging as degrading. And I can’t say that this man is a particularly bad person. He saw what he wanted and went after it. But did that something have to be me, pantsless?
As I shivered my way through the myriad tourists, I realized something about the whole ordeal. It made me human. It me real. And it made me thankful. Thankful that I am not, in fact, a gold digger. That much of a gold digger. Not enough of a gold digger to lower my standards just for money (which I guess is what a gold digger is, in essence). I came out of the Barneys Warehouse Sale with a pair of silver Pierre Hardy desert boots, Lanvin shorts and a shirt, Balenciaga jeans, and maybe a little bit of reassurance.
