A black guy all dressed in white meets a white guy all dressed in black, with carabiners and a coffee cup hanging off his pants, on the Petaluma footbridge. The black guy smiles and says something like "Man... you're equipped for anything!" The white guy says something like "Just about!", and they go their separate ways.
Outside of Burning Man, I rarely meet anybody who seems to think my way of dressing is anything worth commenting on, at least in a positive manner. I've had so many warm experiences with black people; their culture, in the US at least, values things differently than the whites. Black Rock City is a place where white people can, for one brief week, be as cool as most black people are all year long.
I found a way to carry both my down vest and leather jacket around my waist: unclipping the belt to which my pants are carabinered (while the pants hold the belt in place, and sliding the sleeveholes of the vest onto it, then clipping the belt back together, having the vest like an apron in front of me. Then, using another carabiner on the right, clip the top buttonhole of the jacket; bringing the other side around to my left, and looping the sleeve around my belt. So now it's like a kilt, the vest in front and the jacket in back. The next step should be to have a bag which I can pee into, unobtrusively, while in a city with no free restrooms, emptying it out when nobody is looking.
last updated 2011-01-02 21:43:20. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com