Underwear of tomorrow!

We've had what they're calling in the news a "cold snap" the past couple of days.

Well, "cold snap" is a pretty relative term. When I lived in Chicago, we would have called this an "early spring" or "unseasonably mild conditions" or perhaps even "the perfect weekend for barbeque."

Yeah so it's all relative, but the thing is in Chicago I had a lot of really warm clothes, so 28 degrees was no big deal. 28 degrees meant maybe a four-layer day. You know, a jacket over a sweater over a flannel shirt over my longjohns.

But here in El Cerrito, I don't even have longjohns. I haven't had longjohns for years. In fact, the last time I bought longjohns, they were real longjohns, like you see in the cartoons. I got them in an army surplus store across the street from the Biograph Theater in 1979 for maybe ten bucks.

So this morning I got up and see Natalie Cat curled up on the heating duct in the living room, and that's when I knew it was really cold. You know, Natalie Cat is not the kind of cat who has a problem with the cold. I mean look at her. She looks like she's wearing Mother Nature's snow suit.

So the first thing I thought when I saw Natalie Cat hugging the heating duct like a shipwrecked sailor on flotsam was "Oh man, I am going to freeze my butt off tomorrow if I don't go buy some longjohns."

See, we're going to Angel Island tomorrow. The whole day. So I go to R.E.I. and I ask for just plain old longjohns, and the sales guy says "Oh we don't carry anything like that. That stuff is no good. You'll freeze in that stuff if you get it wet. See, we have this special Buttex polymer underwear with Fannyguard protection" and on and on.

So long story short I buy the fancy underwear. It's thirty bucks for the tops, thirty-five for the bottoms, and I won't hypothermiate if I get wet.

Did I do the right thing? Eight years I lived in Chicago I never got my longjohns wet.

Well, maybe once or twice in the upper deck at Wrigley Field. But I never heard of anybody hypothermiating from spilled Budweiser.

Kurt "big daddy" True
13 january 2007