Boing Boing brings us news that the heartless communiss cretins running the Shanghai outpost of the police state are going after fashion-forward citizens who wear pajamas in public. An iron curtain descends! Meanwhile, in a blow for sartorial liberty, I went out this morning to buy bread at a bakery down the street wearing sweatpants and the long tunic part of a shalwar kameez that Julie bought me for kicks when we lived off Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. True, I had a leather topcoat on over it, but the tunic’s tails flapped like Old Glory in the breeze.
“You went to the bakery in your shalwar kameez?” said Julie, when she emerged from the bedroom.
“Yeah.”
“People are going to think you’re a character. Oh, maybe that’s the point.”
I prefer to think of myself an avatar Ignatian aestheticism (Walker Percy: “Here at any rate is Ignatius Reilly, without progenitor in any literature I know of–slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one–who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt, in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans ….”) — and now, knowing what the dirty Chicoms are up to, consider my pajama promenade an exercise in Philadelphia freedom!