“The Absolute Latest in Alternative Fashions” by Simon Jacobs

The Absolute Latest in Alternative Fashion:

Recent Aesthetic Decisions Made by Other People That Made Me Really, Really Happy

1. One teal blue sock (with a yellow stripe) matched with teal eyeshadow. Characteristically, on a daily basis the socks do not match each other.

The worst periods of my first two years in college I spent motionless, sitting idly on a bench outside, watching things happen around me. Definitionally, as my parents would have wanted, this qualified as “public exposure,” but I contributed nothing. The bench overlooked the grassy center of our fair Midwestern campus, known as “the heart,” studded with Adirondack chairs, which was where students would congregate on nicer days. My bench was just off the sidewalk, so many people were obligated to pass me on their way to classes. I watched the whole campus go by, picked out the ones I liked.

2. Two approximately three-quarter inch-wide ear gauges, one black, the other pink.

Back in my senior year of high school, I had started writing a novel, and for the past two-and-a-half years its completion dominated most of my life. It was about a dying liberal arts college during the final year of its existence, a mass of 500 pages and nine “interconnected” narrators into which I funneled all of my considerable angst. Because I hadn’t actually been to college yet, the novel’s setting and characters were all a great deal of supposition. I arrived at school the next fall only to be proven exactly right.

3. On the brim of a bright yellow knit cap, two happy, squinty eyes, like mini rounded n’s, with a little dash of a mouth beneath. (This hat, I wrote a story about.)

Late in the fall, freshman year: virginal sexual desperation drove me starving to the campus coffee shop, where I huddled with a notebook over the course of an intensive, fairly sopping two-week period and wrote a 13,000-word erotic novella that I was intent on submitting to Harlequin. High-school crushes returned, embodied. I prayed that my physiological descriptions of sex were not glaringly fantastical. Elvis Costello was my soundtrack.

4. Spiral-like, tentacular gauges, in approximately this design:

A part of me laments that I will probably never get close enough to find out whether they’re real or not. Another part wants it to remain a mystery.

Dark, parallel Septembers. One rainy night during my first semester at the college I continue to attend, a combination of loneliness and writer’s block on my unfinished novel drove me to stand stock-still in the corner of a dorm parking lot, staring at a tree, waiting for divine, human intervention or a creative break. I stood for hours. After a few tentative approaches by roving packs of students (“Don’t go near him!”), someone from one of the nearby dorms got concerned and called security.

A white truck rolled up. One of the security guys stuck his head out the window. “Hey man, what’re you up to?”

“I’m waiting for inspiration.”

“Uh-huh.” He looked skeptical. He checked my eyes. “How long have you been standing here?”

“I don’t know. Maybe two hours.”

“…Okay…”

The security guys drove off.

Inspiration didn’t come, and an hour later, the truck returned.

“Look. We’ve gotten multiple calls. You’re scaring people.”

So I left.

A year later, I was sitting on the bench, doing essentially the same thing.

5. A mohawk with bangs (on the sides, occasionally frontal), dyed to match.

On my bench, undergoing some kind of quiet, piecemeal mental breakdown, I offered time-sensitive greetings to every single person who walked by—“Good morning,” “Good afternoon,” and “Good evening.” I warmed inordinately to those who returned them and cast tremendous moral judgment on those who didn’t.

6. Short, wild, fire-engine red hair. I’m amazed at how well the color keeps, week after week. (This, too, I wrote a story about. I put the bright yellow hat on the red hair. The combination was wonderful.)

At that time, I had my eye on one girl in particular, whose face reminded me of “David Bowie, circa ’72 or ’73,” as I wrote in my journal, the daily log of emotional turbulence that marked the first month of my sophomore year. With regards to this girl, I exhorted myself to “buck the fuck up and do something.” Of course, I never did. A year later, we now live in the same building, and have never spoken.

She was the only one who replied to “Good afternoon” with “Good afternoon.” The only one.

I finished consecutive drafts of my novel.

7. A pectoral tattoo featuring a painting of a hot air balloon on an artist’s canvas, floating above an unfinished mountain landscape.

John told me that it represented his view of religion: something free and untethered, traversing unknowable territory (the unfinished landscape) at great heights with only the wind and a small amount of liquid propane to guide us.

The cover of Bowie’s ’73 album Aladdin Sane provided the inspiration for my first tattoo. During my session, Chad talked about doing the equivalent of forty hits of acid at once at a concert. I felt somewhat out of place.

8. The placement and texture of the six or seven rows of quarter-inch nickel studs on the back of a leather jacket, as well as the triangular section of one-inch tree spikes on the sleeve of said leather jacket—“For smacking people,” John says. The jacket itself, as a fully customizable artifact, the patched, pinned and painted bearer of one’s fancies. The whole thing weighs nineteen pounds, and is too big.

Fashions and tastes change. I started listening to punk music, then spent a semester abroad. I stole from David Bowie and wrote another apocalyptic erotic story. When I came back, one of my friends carved my hair into a mohawk.

Lately, I’ve been cannibalizing my novel’s characters for other stories. Sometime in the last six months I started to consider the book a form of dead matter, and have already begun scavenging. On the other hand, I’ve started to notice more beauty.

Now, I paint other peoples’ fiction onto my back.

9. The collaboration of extraneous accessories (earrings, piercings, pins, patches, wristbands, miniature stuffed animals dangling from a backpack). Praise for the one who puts him- or herself together part by part each morning.

These things—all of these things—I am still writing stories about.

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Simon Jacobs edits the Safety Pin Review, a new, wearable medium for fiction under 30 words. The erotic novella he started in the coffee shop, Five Days, was recently made available to the public by OC Press. He has since discovered that the gauges are real. The novel is dead, but we have spoken. Simon leaves other translucent confessions at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.