38... it's a size, not an age...

I did it. Ok? I did it. I was down four or five pounds, but nothing I do can combat the presences of the in-laws, which involves many restaurants and nearly constant baking... not to mention the Sudden Presence of Many Bags of Minty Holiday Candies. So the four pounds came back, then I ripped the knee out of my last-good-fitting-pair-of-jeans building this fucking playhouse (more on the playhouse later) and when my wife and I went on a date Saturday night, I had, quite literally, no pants to wear.

So I bought them...

Thirty...

Eight..

I don’t get depressed about losing my hair. I don’t get depressed about driving a boring car full of Cheerios and animal cracker crumbs. I don’t get depressed about the wrinkles or the odd gray beard hair. But the pants...

And it's not even so much the 38" as it is the Spectre of Forty. Because once you buy those 40" jeans - I'm sorry, but you are officially a Fat Guy... one of those guys whose belt buckle points DOWN and whose pants still somehow manage to defy the laws of physics and stay up. And I've been fighting it... oh, how I've been fighting it! Going to the gym, people... THE GYM. I don’t think words exist in the English language to describe the hatred I have for the gym. (The Germans probably have one. "Bikenvalkenhätzen" or something.) But apparently age 35 is another one of those metabolic milestones like 25 and 30. Once twenty-five hit, I could no longer eat an entire bag of Doritos daily without consequences. Once thirty hit, I said goodbye forever to the 34" jeans. And now, at age thirty-five? Bring out the Fat Guy Pants.

I suppose I should be happy that they are at least LOOSE. But still. Looking down the gaping maw of the Fat Pants as I was about to put them on this morning, I think I saw something at the end of those two dark denim tunnels. It was the last vestige of my youth.