Thank You for Sending Me an Angle
The first time I ever saw a man wearing a wool sweater and horn rimmed glasses in real life I wanted to fuck him and I did. I had only seen men who looked like that in magazines. I wanted to fuck him because, given what I could aesthetically ascertain, I knew he must have been like me. I belonged in magazines too.
In my day (read: my pubescence, which took place around the turn of the millenium), the aesthetics defined the person. Now, when I say “aesthetics,” I don’t mean difficult-to-impossible-to alter physical attributes, none of which contribute to a person’s ability to possess style — weight, race, skin condition, et al. I mean clothing, makeup, accessory choice. It was easy then to take a cursory glance at someone and determine all you needed to know about whether or not they possessed carnal and/or emotional worth. Unwashed hair? Fuckable. Wrap around sunglasses? Unfuckable. Vintage t-shirt, regardless of message? Fuckable.
Side Note: Opting out of aesthetics entirely was also a choice that, when made for the right reasons, could be enticing. Can’t be bothered to engage in fashion because you’re too busy staying up every night writing your manifesto on a Gateway computer? Sign me up for your LISTSERV!
Cities then operated with nuance; small towns operated on the binary. As a resident of one, you either looked cool or you looked like everyone else. Altering your appearance was some of the only agency you had; it was also a way to draw a line in the sand and really sock it to your troubled parents that you were, in fact, “not like other girls.” Whenever I came across anyone even remotely aesthetically interesting in the style-deficient wasteland of Central California I took it upon myself to investigate further — I developed a number of crushes on teachers as a result. Some Andie MacDowell-looking bitch in a scarf who briefly taught English was the first. A redheaded, bespectacled Jew who let me write part of his Modern American Literature class curriculum was the second.
Side Note: I also developed a crush on a generally unremarkable science teacher solely because I heard his wife died in a car accident while giving head to him but I digress.
When everyone in your hometown looked like absolute shit it was easy to differentiate yourself either by purchasing decent (and therefore unwanted) clothing at thrift stores or by making it yourself. It was a form of signaling, proof you skimmed the right magazines while standing upright at the liquor store (note that perusing the internet wasn’t an option at the time; dial up was expensive and every static GIF, pornographic or non, took two fucking hours to download). I’d poorly sew sleeveless, funnel neck shirts and pair them with my grandmother’s gray knee length polyester pleated skirts in an attempt to replicate what I saw in said magazines and therefore culture at the time. I’d pridefully sport these costumes like a peacock extending its feathers, strutting through the Target aisles looking for a mate.
I wore knee length platform boots and an electric orange fuzzy peacoat to my sister’s funeral. Was I counting on a fuckable third cousin I hadn’t yet encountered showing up? I also pretended to be asleep during the duration of the funeral, so I never would have “met” them anyway.
My cultural frustration was rivaled only by my sexual frustration. I’d ride my father’s mountain bike around town at night listening to Talking Heads on a Walkman, waiting for the miracle.
One day, praise all, the miracle appeared — big nose, big glasses, bad posture, bob cut, black wardrobe yet a love for high fashion, which she planned on studying in college. I didn’t look like a moron to her; I looked cool. We started hanging out, sitting in the library every lunch period and talking endless streams of shit. I thought for sure she was into me — she invited me onto her waterbed to listen to “Early Billy Joel” for chrissakes — but I showed my hand too soon and sent (as in, mailed) her a long winded letter expressing my true, non-platonic feelings. Immediately after placing it in the mailbox I knew I had fucked up. I could tell when she received my missive because the next day she stopped making eye contact. Shortly thereafter I broke into the art classroom to steal photographs of her I knew the teacher kept in her desk (the teacher had photographs of all of us, posing next to our mediocre and derivative paintings).
The man with the horned rimmed glasses I moved in with the night I met. I was supposed to get on a Greyhound after our date and return dejected to my mothers house, having failed yet again at escaping Hollister, but I didn’t want to and he was lonely so I didn’t. Right before he took me to the bus station we had driven out to Snoqualmie Falls; while watching the illuminated waterfall ceaselessly spit he informed me he could have murdered me right then and no one would have known. We lived together for three years. Even after we broke up I followed him from Seattle to his hometown of Cleveland, so desperate I was to never move back in with my mother.
Time passed, the internet became more accessible and signaling became more of a crapshoot as a result. Now I had to ask what was on someone’s bookshelf; I could no longer just assume based on external optics. Somehow this made things even more complicated.
A stranger messaged me on Myspace because I liked the cartoonist Ivan Brunetti and so, having reached a terminus in Cleveland and not wanting to return to Central California, I did the only thing my undeveloped brain offered as a solution — I moved in with him in New Orleans. At the time, he was the person I culturally had the most in common with; he was also the shittiest person I have ever known. When I wore a (vintage teal Le Coq Sportif, not that you asked) tennis skirt to Mardi Gras and some mouth breather stuck a hand under it he said it was my fault for dressing like a slut. He didn’t appreciate the power of my wardrobe, its history as a tool to separate me from the, well, tools. I ended up leaving a garbage bag full of vintage X-Girl pieces by a dumpster when he kicked me out of his house for not sucking his dick. I don’t really think about the abuse anymore but I think about that garbage bag all the time. His dismissal of aesthetics made me appreciate them with renewed fervor.
Now I live in Los Angeles but the entire world has become Los Angeles — aesthetic has become a hashtag, a word as overused and therefore empty as “literally.” I see a lesbian on Tik Tok and she looks cute but then the algorithm shows me another and she looks the same iteration of cute and so on and so on and really, what they all look like is Kelly Preston in “Citizen Ruth”. Visually, they intrigue me, but I can surmise little about them based on this. There is no modern style, just an amalgam of other generations’, a byproduct of the fact that we can all just follow fashion accounts on Instagram and buy shit on Depop and not have to hope the right person died the week we hit up the Salvation Army. I miss the simplicity of sight-based judgement, but it also never did me any favors so why exactly do I miss it? Maybe I just miss simplicity in general. Maybe I just miss the binary.
End Note: The day after I started writing this I answered a photoless Craigslist ad posted by a woman in Arcadia who was giving away “hundreds” of fashion magazines minted around the time I was escaping through them in high school. I committed to taking them all sight unseen. I had to cart them out of her father’s garage on a dolly; eventually I had a car full of coveted print the poster’s friend had told her to “just throw in the recycling”. Somehow the universe knew I was thinking about my youth spent staring at Alek Wek and acted accordingly.
