Flannel is Tackier than the New Generation of “Super” models (Besides Anok Yai)

On Wednesday there was one, Thursday brought three, maybe four. They’re like spotted lanternflies, multiplying like bacterial colonies with unmistakable red-on-black tops (or bottoms, I don’t judge); I’d gladly stomp on every last one, maybe even flamethrower that chess-like tapestry. 

It’s (un)officially that yearly introduction of regretting wearing your shorts to school. Summer leaves become copper like an iron bird left out during one of the sky’s many sob sessions, and the night slows like an archaic deity of the North Pole casting his frigid net across the Scarsdale square. The “welcome” mat for the pumpkin-gutting season also invites the D1 champion of my least favorites: Flannel Warriors.

To my right stands a window separating me from an insurmountable temperate abyss ( 59ºF ) and to my left sits a man in his mid-30s being worn by a tacky criss-crossed Jackson Pollock. The first time my magnetic bundle of vision saw that mess, it was like a haute couture model getting hit on by a construction worker on leave -- immediately repelled.  

Axe Body Spray clings to his skin like a blood-starved leech while tight blue jeans constrict the Na’vi in the Omatikaya rainforest of leg hairs in a boa-like fashion; I want to be Colonel Quaritch.

I don’t know where the epidemic originated from. Upon seeing the red-on-black plaid chessboard like a bull wrapped in crimson cloth, my heart loses its muscle memory and my eye starts twitching like a crispy autumn leaf clinging onto a seizing branch in a hurricane. Golden blues and cool yellows pound into the floor with each step I should have run, sprouting flowers of extraterrestrial hues that splinter in the shadow of that 30-year-old man. I would have picked up those skin-slitting shards if they weren’t dressed in that miserable musk.

It. Does. Not. Work. 

They look like a faded Christian Dior on crack-cocaine pinata’d a mink on a loose-fitting tablecloth in the impossibly worst possible way. It’s not even ugly (it’s disfiguringly repulsive), it's the fact that EVERY IMAGINABLE WAY TO USE IT, ALONE OR WITH OTHERS, is like accessorizing a clump of cowlicked fecal matter.

Those things remind me of my Texas-torn skin ( Go Longhorns ), the most diverse part of my character. Freckles and moles connect to each other in a scar-lined constellation like black spots of oil spills twisted into the beauty that they wished they were. There’s a faded horizontal slit across my nose bridge from 1st grade, and there’s a fresh and festering gash across my right atrium from that same era. 

Laurel Mountain Elementary School taught that just because we’re 7 doesn’t mean we can’t get broken by hail storms of falling boulders, some thrown, and just because we’re 8 doesn’t mean our armored skin is metallic enough to deflect the whip of steel. 

No, those aren’t metaphors. 

I wish they were though -- sentences of illogically threaded words woven together into Arachne’s magnum opus by a metaphorician. I tossed pebbles and got hit by pillars, and I stabbed with sentences and received a crossfire of pocketknives. 

The reason, the other one, that the ladybug-colored fabric actually sucks so much is because it’s constant. Unperturbed and unshifting, plaid has lived for 300 years while I have to go deep-sea fishing for a single idea in my polar ocean of consciousness that will only last 30 minutes max before it expires and becomes like an Early 2000s commercial product — irrelevant (and unusable).

Can my brain chisel away at its own endless depths to the unachievable goal of an aqueous Michelangelo’s David wearing a flannel overcoat? Fuck no. The waves would pollute the Arctic blue with icy 90s supermodel heroin whites. It would give it a nice iridescent effect, though.

If putting on Lululemon-level skintight jeans and wearing a crumb-painted sweatshirt under a blanket of blood-red squares and asphalt black stripes will calm that tempest, then plaster me in that 52/365.