It's "Bring Your Sweaty Clown to Work" Day

Shorts season has definitely arrived in New York and this morning I was happy to put on a pair of wonderfully cool (temperature-wise) red, white, and blue plaid madras shorts I bought last summer. I remember thinking at the time that they looked pretty slick with my black and white "No freedom without dissent" t-shirt. Somehow a clue must have gotten loose in my head in the intervening year because after putting on that very outfit in the zombie fog of morning, I took a look down at myself on the walk to the subway and realized that I was wearing a clown suit to work today. The effect was that much worse because my sandals are in the shop for retreading and so I had to wear my Nike Frees, which are not merely white but actually glowing from the generously-bleached washing they got over the weekend, and I was carrying my lunch in an old Apple-store bag in honor of today's Stevenote at WWDC, and as you may recall, those bags, they're white. I don't know what was in my head last summer when I did this to myself, on purpose, on a regular basis, but I can imagine that maybe if I saw this outfit on, say, a grizzled old african-american guy, it might look kind of badass in a retired-pimp kind of way. On me, it looks dumbass in a dumbass kind of way.

Fortunately, if you're going to go out in public dressed like an idiot, today is just the kind of day to do it. It's a thousand degrees in New York City; when I left the house at 8:00 this morning, there was a guy walking in front of me who had already taken his shirt off just for the walk to the subway. Not a good sign. So, all the people on the street who, on another day, might be wondering if I'm about to bust out a unicycle or a bucket full of confetti, are instead limited to thinking about eating snow or killing someone. If you're going to go out all day looking like a jackass, there's no better time to do it than when everyone else is too absorbed in their own misery to notice.