Summer

Hot Wet Wool

I don't remember how it started, just that it involved one of those highly controversial naked celebrity magazine covers that gets circulated throughout the nation about once every month or so.

Like, I don't get why it's such a big deal. Who cares that she's naked?

Not me. It doesn't make me more likely to buy the magazine. I don't even like naked people.

Me neither. I don't like being naked, myself.

I know! Why does everyone else like it so much? It's like they can't wait to take their clothes off.

It was the summer of '07, and Tom* and I were visiting Hollywood for the first time. If a Daniel Clowes panel were happening in real time, it would be Mel's Diner, but we didn't know that at the time. We just got all excited about the advertising outside the diner that makes it appear to be an old Hollywood staple--the kind of place where businessmen make movie deals go down, or used to back in the '60's.

I don't even like it when I'm by myself.

Me neither! You know how everyone always talks about how they like to sleep naked? I never do that. I have to be fully clothed, even if it's hot outside.

Yeah, me too. I don't even like looking at myself naked. I can't walk around my apartment naked or anything like that. People like that weird me out.

Like Matthew McConaughey.

Our booth was in the dead center of the diner on a fairly busy morning, and there were all types of strange, eccentric, glum-looking types around us. People with exaggerated features who looked like they were just saturated with sad life experiences that probably involved weird relationships with their cats and decades-long leases in apartments with outdated wallpaper.

I know! I don't even like getting naked to take a shower!

Totally. But no one ever understands that. People are always so ready to get naked over any little thing. And they think we're the weird ones.

But we're not.

Right. We're not.

We were tourists in a strange town, far away from home, and here was yet another level to our outsider status. It was as though we had wandered into some kind of character actor's convention and joined in because we couldn't find a convenient back door to slip out of. So, we were stuck there and we flip-flopped between micro-focusing on our own little booth and macro-focusing on the surreality of the surroundings. It's worth noting that we're also both writers, which not only means that we generally reek of desperation and are afraid of everything, but also that we were are that much more prone to do anything within our power to try to fit in.

But don't you feel like you need some kind of excuse for not liking to be naked or something?

Yeah. Most people that hate being naked have a good excuse for it. But I don't. I've just always been that way.

That summer everyone in the world was talking about some magazine with some shivering naked Disney starlet on the cover. Like I said, I don't even remember which one it was anymore. Just that it led to a bigger discussion about nudity and how everyone was doing it. What was the big deal? We couldn't figure it out.

Sometimes I just wish I had something to blame. Like, my mom is also weird about nudity, and from the time that I was a small child, she would wrap me up in hot, wet wool to make me associate my own skin with being really uncomfortable.

Yeah, that's a good one, actually. I think I might use that from now on.

You should. I can't imagine anything more uncomfortable than being wrapped up in hot, wet wool. Besides just being naked.

By the time that our waiter brought us the bill, we had the whole thing completely figured out. It was a perfectly valid excuse that later extended into a more elaborate storyline about how our mothers put hot dogs into our macaroni and cheese and told us they were the fingers of bad boys and girls.

God, will you just look at these people? What a bunch of freaks!

Yeah. What do you think their lives are like?

Who even knows.

* name has been changed, but you can read his blog HERE! Check it out. He's a very funny fellow.