Another Old Coot Marginalizing Himself

Forbes editor Rich Karlgaard had an interesting post the other day on his blog. He was at a hotel and sent out his pants for dry cleaning. Turns out, they sent him someone else's clean breeches. The dilemma was, he liked them much better than his own and thought about wearing them. You can go read the whole thread here if you want. My post today is about some Old Coot cluelessly admitting more stuff than he should in that comment thread. Here's his first comment:

Several items along this line.

I almost never buy my own clothes. Shirts, especially, simply show up hanging in my closet. Leather jackets. Blue jeans too. Even shoes. My wife shops.

I do get to go with her when good suits are involved, of course. But casual stuff...who cares? Knock yourself out, Baby.

There are three grown women in my household...In addition to my wife, our daughters who are 36 years old and 34 years old are unmarried, have their own homes in San Francisco and Chicago but visit their mother quite a lot. Especially when I am out of the country. The one in San Francisco seems to like our washer and dryer more than her own...free soap? I don't know.

Sometimes shirts, etc. that I find hanging in my closet really do not fit me at all. Way too big or entirely too small. I do not ask any questions about such matters. All sorts of possibilities come to mind...none of them worth talking about.

Accuse a grown woman of...what... exactly? There's three of them. I don't even have a 50-50 chance of guessing right.

They would each just look at me like I might have been saying something...but they have no idea what it could be.

When I take my shirts to the laundry (20 at once) from time to time I discover that an orphan has found its way into my lot. Hard to catch this with the white shirts...but the colored shirts...I can pretty much pick out the newcomers. If the shirt fits...shoot, wear it!

When we played football we threw our incredibly sweaty and foul tee-shirts (worn under the shoulder pads) into a canvas bin on wheels and walked to the showers...We simply took a clean one from the stack the next day on the way into the locker room.

So what? Some of you are squeemish about any of this? What were we saying last week about the "Wussification of America"?

For crying out loud!



Did you get what this Old Coot just said?

He said that in his household, consisting of his wife and two daughters, random men's shirts make frequent appearances.

Bear in mind, that as a financial blog, almost everyone who reads Digital Rules is a dude.

This guy has no clue how bad that admission makes him look. Do you think a bunch of married women get together at tea parties and glibly divulge, "You know, I find random bras and panties lying around the house...it's no big deal."

I THINK NOT! (at least outside France)

This situation reminds me of a frequent parley among the Neanderthals down in the trading pits of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. Some guy would come in donning a hideous new shirt:

OtherTrader - [laughing] Yo, where the *blank* did you get that ugly shirt?

UglyShirtWearer - Out of YOUR closet this morning, *sshole!

If you don't get the comeback, I'll translate - It means he diddled your woman/wife and grabbed the shirt out of your closet on his way out.

Down in the pit, every joke was your-mother, your-wife, your-sister, etc. Just like 4th grade!

But the rule most of us young coots understood, is that you certainly don't go into a roomful of men, paint yourself as a cuckold and set yourself up for such well-deserved ball breaking.

Though I have a slight antagonistic relationship with this fossil, out of the kindness of my heart I swallowed all jokes this time. I have had some pretty acerbic exchanges with him; nonetheless the Old Coot is likable in an avuncular sort of way.

But then he opened the door some more. Here's a subsequent comment he posted:

My girls are drop-dead beautiful and bright. Really. Just like their mother, they simply own just about any man they get around.

The older one brings home these heavy hitter Silicon Valley engineer types and the occasional professional athlete. She now tells people she is 27 (instead of 36)...She's simply having too much fun.

The younger one in Chicago manages clinical studies inside one of the major Pharmaceutical houses...and there is a guy that we do know about now...she never let us meet any of her young men before (although her girlfriends always whispered to my wife that she had them scattered around the country...) so this might be serious. Good.

My own little woman is known to everyone as the Big Boss...I myself took a Vow of Poverty after the divorce (when that first one) dropped me to zero a very long time ago.

The Big Boss owns everything...literally. Including the pants she lets me wear.

Fries,

When I was dating girls in my own ill-spent youth I did notice that the easiest ones had the most-likely-to-take-a-human-life (again) fathers. When my daughters hit 16 I looked in the mirror and realized I was exactly that same way too (West Virginia breeding).

"Boy, let me explain to you how easy it is to turn a bull calf into a steer...if you got a razor blade and can count to two..."

Maybe that has been the problem all along. Thanks.



So, after blithely notifying the entire world that random dudes' clothes show up at his house, he goes on to elaborate lest anyone not fully understand.

One of his daughters simply has "too much fun" and the other has men "scattered around the country". Then, to boot, he compares himself to the fathers of all the "easiest" girls he's dated throughout his youth.

Talk about self-mutilation!

For the record, my daughter will certainly not be allowed to have any such "fun".

And if she does, I will be neither deluding myself about how flattering it is, nor blogging about it on the World Wide Web.

Furthermore, if I do devolve into an incontinent Old Coot myself, I am quite sure my kids will muzzle me.

As Will Durant has said - Silence is trebly golden after the age of sixty...

Indeed.