Yes, it appears that our most recent stretch of warm days is finally over, which means temperatures in the forecast that don’t break above 60 degrees, and even cooler nights. It’s been a long time coming, folks…I’m even hearing that in what I’m sure will be surprising to absolutely nobody, this may end up being the warmest October ever, at least in my neck of the woods. On the anniversary this past week of 2006’s “Surprise storm”, in which lake-effect snow pounded Buffalo, wrecking thousands of trees that hadn’t dropped all their leaves yet, we were in shorts because it was 75 out.
No doubt all of you* have been asking, “Look, dude, all this music writing and book stuff and all is great, but what’s new with your bib overalls collection?!” And I am always one to give the public what it wants**, so here’s something new!
Well, naturally, if you buy a pair of striped overalls in a new label and style, you’ll be happy…for a while. But then the nagging voice will start whispering in your ear, late at night, when you’re trying to decide which overalls-and-shirt pairing you’re going to wear tomorrow****:
“Sure, the striped pair is great, but you know, you really really REALLY need a pair of the same overalls in the classic blue denim. You NEED them. It’s science!”*****
So, off to eBay I went, whereupon I created a new Saved Search for Washington Dee Cee overalls. There are almost always a few pairs available, because Dee Cee was a popular and common brand back in the “glory days” of bib overalls, but as they are always vintage by definition, they tend to be expensive. But…persistence pays off! I finally scored a pair for a price that wasn’t enough to make you look at me like I’m insane.******
Washington Dee Cee overalls, frontWashington Dee Cee overalls, rear
I actually acquired these in July, which is the time of year when I don’t wear overalls much at all, because it’s just too warm. Aside from trying them on when they arrived, I have really only worn them one day, and that was on our annual Ithaca trip a couple of weeks ago. I paired them with another new acquisition, a “Renfest” style shirt. I realize that wearing a shirt like this may put me a bit too close to “Jerry Seinfeld in the pirate shirt” territory, but I figure that now that I’m fifty, I’ve long since reached the point of being able to wear what the hell I want and give zero f*cks about it.
Washington Dee Cee overalls, with blue “renfest” shirtSame, just…sitting down
I have to admit, I genuinely like this look. It’s my version of the “cottagecore” thing that’s been popular of late. There’s something, well, me about a Renfest shirt worn under a pair of nicely-worn vintage denim overalls, isn’t there?
Anyway, if it ever gets reliably and seasonably cool around here (as I write this we’re entering a several-day stretch of possible record highs for mid-October, which is not ideal), I look forward to pairing these overalls with some of the new flannel shirts I have around…and I can’t rule out ordering another of these Renfest shirts, maybe in white this time.
And of course, the highest praise has already come. Carla approves of these overalls!
Sleepy doggo!
* None of you have been asking this.
** Yeah, this is just a lie.
*** You do not remember this. I do not hold this against you. (OK, I do. A little.)
**** Not kidding! I really do put thought into this. I don’t just roll out of bed, grab a shirt and some overalls, and go about my day. Come on, folks. I’m weird, but I’m not some heathen.
***** Why am I dragging poor science into this? Science has nothing to do with overalls. Sheesh!
****** “Har har, we already look at you like–” Yeah, yeah, I know. You don’t have to say it.
It’s almost June, so it’s just about time to retire the flannel shirts until maybe late September, but more likely, some time in October.
When I was a kid, in third or fourth grade, my father decided that I needed to wear flannel shirts. At the time I did not understand this. I quite hated collared shirts as a kid, for whatever reason, so I took a rather instantaneous dislike to the flannel shirts that ended up in my closet. As I recall, they were new and stiff and scratchy, and all of that was on top of my already-establish dislike of buttons and collars. (Again, I’ve no idea why I hated those things so much. We all have things about which we are dumbasses in our youth; collared shirts were one if mine.)
Even when I started coming around some years ago on collars and button-ups and such, I was still kind of hesitant about flannel, because while I’ve long since discovered flannel bed sheets and I have a couple of denim shirts that are flannel-lined, I still have that association with stiff, scratchy flannel collars and shirts that fit, well, stiffly and scratchily. Also, there was a bit of fear that flannel–especially plaid flannel–paired with overalls would make me look like something of a cast extra from Hee Haw. (That show was on a lot in our house when I was very young, which may explain where my lifelong love of bib overalls comes from. And since it was a variety show in the 70s, I’m guessing the occasional pie wound up in a face or two….)
Over the last couple of years a few flannel shirts have made their way into my wardrobe, though, via thrift stores and eBay, and I’m happy to report that I am finally embracing that particular fabric…and even in the plaid. Hey, there’s a reason why plaid flannel and overalls is a classic combination, right? And yes, it’s a classic combination!
I started with a couple of flannel shirts that I picked up at the local thrift stores, and while I like these, they’re a bit more broken in than I would like. I have since found more intact ones (new, with tags) on eBay, including a black-and-white checked shirt…
…and a blue one…
and, most recently, this cool multi-colored one.
I remain in the market for a flannel shirt that is predominantly red, but I haven’t found one I really like yet. As with just about all of my button-up shirts, I prefer button-down collars or, as in this one that I found in a stroke of luck, a banded collar:
Anyway, roughly 32 years or so after my father first tried getting me to like flannel, I’m finally on board. What can I say…I’m not the fastest study in the world. Of course, now it’s warm out and I’m having days where I don’t wear overalls at all (shorts and a t-shirt as I’m writing this, go figure), so it’ll be a while before I’m wearing flannel shirts again. But fall will be here before we know it! (And not soon enough, if the 90s in May we’ve had already are any indication of what’s in store for summer.)
One of my requests last Christmas was a new sweater or two, in a lighter color to counteract the general dark tone of my existing sweater collection (some of which are also getting a bit old). The Wife gave me a wonderful light-blue sweater with a neat pattern around the top, and a cowl neck that zips up. It’s similar to an Icelandic Lopapeysa sweater, but it’s not made of wool. This has quickly become one of my very favorite sweaters, and as a bonus, it seems to go really well with overalls!
Here’s a suitably dramatic pose, taken in an alley in Hamburg, NY. The Dee-oh-gee and I were killing time outside while The Wife went into our favorite local bakery to buy stuff. I like the color contrasts here, between the sweater, the overalls, the scarf, the doggo, and the wall behind us:
The color and pattern (apparently called a yoke design) go well with either solid blue overalls or with hickory stripes. I assume it will go well with the herringbone overalls as well, but I haven’t worn the sweater with those yet.
As always, I make few (if any) apologies for the fact that my main criteria for judging whether or not I want to add a top to my wardrobe is, “Do I think this will look good under a pair of overalls?” I mean, it’s my thing, y’know?
Oh, and the title of this post constitutes a little joke. I have no Icelandic roots at all.
There’s a vintage advertisement for the fantasy role playing game Dungeons and Dragons that makes the rounds once in a while, so this time I decided to play a game of “Who Wore It Better”. I think I did it pretty well!
I’m happiest that I was able to be accurate down to the brand of overalls the kid is wearing. Score!
It’s February (sorry about the lack of posting, there’s some stuff going on that’s not horrible but occupying lots of brain cycles), and with it comes, as always, Black History Month. Here is a thread I saw on Twitter yesterday, from a user going as “LEFT Ph. D”, describing in brief the part that something near and dear to me plays in Black history in America: overalls!
I tried embedding the individual tweets, but for some reason the code to do so was kind of wonky, so I’m reproducing the text and images below, in sequence as they appeared. WARNING: One of the images is a difficult one, a stark reminder of the casual way we used to show our devaluing of Black lives.
The SNCC referred to in LEFT Ph.D’s commentary is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a student-led movement that was one of the main methods for students in the United States to engage with and support the growing Civil Rights movement. More on them here.
(One of these images is difficult.)
Our clothes come with a politic.
SNCC used denim overalls as a counterbalance between women and men. They used overalls as a symbol of solidarity with sharecroppers in the rural South during Jim Crow. They used overalls to combat politics of responsibility.
Yesterday, my 5-year-old asked me why I always wear overalls. He was curious about the buttons that I wear on my clothes. I didn’t give him a history lesson on denim/workwear and Black folks, but I did show him pictures. I did tell him that those pictures were of our ancestors.
When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, he was wearing denim workwear. He wasn’t wearing his “Sunday best.”
He was aware of the politics of denim.
It was this MLK that wrote ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’.
When Joyce Ladner, Kwame Ture (then (Stokely Carmichael) and other members within SNCC purposely rocked denim overalls, as a uniform, it was a conscious effort to build with Black folks that were most terrorized by violence of Jim Crow America.
I found this all pretty fascinating. Obviously for me, overalls are a thing of comfort and a bit of statement of personal weirdness and quirk. But there’s history behind them, a dark and important history that hasn’t even played out completely yet.
There are a number of favorite subjects of mine that I haven’t used this blog to geek out about in a long time, so let’s go ahead and do some of that right now, OK? Time to talk about bib overalls!
I think it’s long past time to admit that my acquisition of overalls has come to a point where there’s really only one way to describe it without making myself seem like a weirdo (or, maybe at least a little less of a weirdo), and that’s to assert that I am a collector of overalls. That doesn’t seem weird at all, right? When you’re an avowed collector of a thing, owning lots of it and being willing to go to odd lengths to procure it aren’t nearly as weird as if you’re just some goof who owns a whole lot of a particular thing.
Well, that’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.
Which brings me to one recent acquisition for my overalls collection: a pair of Hickory-striped overalls by the Washington Dee Cee company. I haven’t been able to find much information out there about the Dee Cee company, but they were based in Nashville and they made a lot of denim Western-wear and workwear back in the day.
What makes their overalls distinctive is the styling of the large pocket on the bib. Instead of a dual-compartment pocket with two snap enclosures, which tends to be the norm (see Dickies or, my eternal favorite, Lee overalls for examples), the pocket is mainly one large enclosure with a snap in the middle over which a narrow flap fastens. It’s a neat look that’s a nice change from the usual style. Washington Dee Cee overalls were notably modeled by actress Michelle Meyrink in the wonderful 80s nerd-comedy Real Genius…
…and by Mr. T on The A-Team!
I’ve kept an eye out on eBay and other places for a pair of Dee Cee overalls, but usually they were either not in my size, or not in my price range. I did occasionally see this interesting variation, though–and never in my price range. It seems that the Washington Dee Cee people made versions of their overalls but to be branded for another great Tennessee institution:
Well, anyway, luck finally turned my way and I got my hands on a pair of Hickory-striped Washington Dee Cee overalls! I’ve really taken a keen liking to Hickory stripes over the years (commonly thought of as “engineer stripes”, because they’re commonly seen on railroad worker clothing). Here are my new ones!
Some neat bib details here: While the Hickory-stripe pattern is always vertical on overalls, the Washington Dee Cee ones break with this in one place: the flap enclosure on the bib pocket. That makes for a neat visual contrast. At the far left of the bib pocket (the wearer’s left, on the right as you look at them), there is a pencil-slot, and though it can’t really be seen here, there is the traditional pocket-watch pocket that tucks into the seam just above the center tag. (For years I didn’t know that this is what the “button hole” present on most pairs of “traditional” overalls, somewhere across the top of the bib, is for: the fob of a watch chain. It’s one of those details that has held on for tradition’s sake, even though most people who wear overalls aren’t also carrying pocket watches.)
Close-up of the center snap. Back in the day, manufacturers engraved their names on the snaps and buckles.
Center tag. I love tags on overalls. Some people cut them off their overalls! I don’t understand that. But, whatever. [shrugs]
I like them a lot, even if they are just ever so slightly too small, but they’re definitely wearable and I like the way they look. So, huzzah!
So, something cheerful…I’m going to try to post more of that sort of thing over the next few weeks, I think. The world has darkness a-plenty and I’ll be occasionally writing about that, too. But here’s a poem I found by an author named Tony Johnston. She is a prolific writer of books for children who lives in California. This is from a book called Once in the Country: Poems of a Farm, written in 1996.
My Overalls
The best thing is their color,
old-night or early-dawn.
No, the best thing is their limpness
when I hoist them on.
No, the best thing is their looseness
like the soft skin of a pup
No, the best thing is their buckles
like a suitcase snapping shut.
No, the best thing is their perfume
of cows and hay and dung.
No, the best thing is their many holes
to let in all the sun.
Obviously I don’t own any overalls that are redolent of “cows and hay and dung”, but I do have a couple of old pairs–vintage!–that aren’t quite holey yet, but may get there sooner rather than later.
Wow, another decade is in the books. We’re on to the Twenties.
My feelings on the Teens are rather mixed. Societally, worldwide and nationally, I think 2010-2019 represent at best a series of missed opportunities and at worst some serious regressions. But for me personally? The decade was pretty damned good, for the most part. I got ahead professionally at The Day Job, and my writing career continued to advance, even if it took routes that I didn’t entirely expect when 2010 dawned. But this was the decade I got back to hard-core fiction writing after the emotional upheavals of the Aughts made writing deeply difficult.
In 2010 my attitude was, “I wonder if I can write that space opera book.” As 2019 exits, I’ve published three of the books in that series with the fourth coming right along for release in 2020. I’ve published the first book in another series, and I currently have four other novels drafted and awaiting my push into the world. I was a lonely blogger, and now I’m kind-of still that…but I’m also a writer for The Geekiverse, where I get to geek out about things of my choosing.
I launched my official author site as well, ForgottenStars.net. I haven’t been nearly as consistent as I should have been with that space, and even now I’m struggling to figure all that out. Hopefully in 2020 I’ll start to “get my shit together” a bit on that score. I’m trying to add some structure to my creative life, because I’m finding as I get older that the scattershot approach isn’t nearly as conducive to getting things done in a productive way as it was when I was younger.
As far as my “personal brand” goes, I guess it stayed pretty much the way it always was. Books, music, movies, food, drink, nature, occasional travel, and let’s not forget the bib overalls and the pies in the face! I probably have to admit that at this point I am a collector of bib overalls (when you set up eBay email alerts for specific things, it’s time to admit that you’re collecting them), and I continue to find delight in getting hit in the face with a pie.
Anyway, I’ve been photographically documenting my adventures for years, first on Flickr and then more recently on Instagram. Here is a small selection of the goings-on of the last decade. Lots of nature, and overalls, and dogs and cats, and pies! These are not presented particularly chronologically.
I also occasionally make videos and post them to YouTube. I’ve thought about “vlogging” in the past, but I’ve never really found the time or motivation to get into all that (though I don’t rule out appearing on other peoples’ shows and such). Mostly my videos are just forays into me getting hit with pies. Here are the ones I made in the 2010s (links only–I don’t want to take up a ton of space embedding them all):
Goodness, that’s a lot of pies in my face in the 2010s, especially when I consider that I didn’t even get pied in 2019. I suppose I could stop, but where’s the fun in that!
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the decade that’s just ending. Let’s bring on the new one. Even if my 2010s weren’t that bad, the world needs a better decade. Badly. And it’s in our hands to make it happen, folks. So let’s get it done!
The Author poses with his various and sundry Books.
So last weekend was Nickel City Con, which is Western New York’s biggest annual pop culture-related gathering. This particular con only started a few years ago, and there have been hiccups along the way (this year saw an unfortunate rash of cancellations by the booked celebrity guests), but I’ve had a great time at each event.
HOWEVER! The last couple of times I’ve attended as a paying attendee, while this year I was able to attend on an “official” basis as part of The Geekiverse‘s entourage. And even better than that, I was able to set up a stand and sell my books for several hours. Thus I set up my little stand, as pictured above, and proceeded to hawk my wares!
Well, OK. I sold one book the entire afternoon. But hey! The day was not remotely a loss, not by a longshot. It was a wonderfully fun time, hanging out with my fellow geeks and talking about geeky things and seeing the cosplayers wandering by and actually talking about my work with a few con attendees. Even if I didn’t move more than a single book, this was still the kind of event that I found affirming as a writer. (And I award myself bonus points for not yelling at the nice guy who dropped by to chat Star Wars and then proceeded to badmouth Attack of the Clones. See! I can behave!)
I’m already thinking about how next year is going to work: larger and better visual sales aids in addition to the books themselves, plus I hope/plan to have more than just the first three Forgotten Stars books there. The sky is, as ever, the limit…and the sky, when you think about it, is limitless. Onward and upward! Zap! Pow!!
[By way of a parenthetical aside, let me note as I always do after one of these cons that it’s high time for Buffalo to make a bid to host an upcoming World Science Fiction Convention. There is absolutely zero reason why this city can’t make this happen. It would be a fantastic event that would bring several thousand visitors from outside the region, and Buffalo is more than big enough. Remember, WorldCon just a couple of years ago happened in Spokane, WA–a lovely town that’s about half the size of Buffalo. Bring Worldcon to Buffalo! We can even call if BuffCon!]
[Oh, and one more parenthetical note: since this was an event to celebrate geekiness, I figured I couldn’t go wrong with a Groot t-shirt under my trademark overalls. The press pass obscured Groot a bit in the photo above, so here’s how that looked:
I am Groot!
So, my first Con as an author is now behind me. What’s next? Let’s find out! See you around the Galaxy, folks!
