Fashion has been one of the farthest things from my mind lately. I still love clothes, but the reason I love clothes is because they allow me to become a new character every day. When I feel like being an angsty witch girl, I can dress like one; when I want to be the cute girl next door, I can dress the way I imagine the cute girl next door would dress (I've never had a cute girl live next door to me, unfortunately); and when I want to have adventures, I can dress like a grungy wastelander from Fallout. To me, fashion isn't necessarily about looking good because we all have different ideas about what "looking good" really means. Instead, I see fashion as a way to express myself, to express who I am every day (and who am I can sometimes change on a daily basis).
Spring makes me want to have adventures. A few years ago (2008, to be exact), I spent my spring taking road trips. I drove up to Asheville, NC, with three dresses, a pair of red Converse, a few packs of cigarettes, my camera, my acoustic guitar, and my copy of the Grateful Dead's
American Beauty. Because I got lost on the drive to Asheville (due to the distracting beauty of North Georgia mountains), I was almost out of gas when I finally reached my destination, and I was unsure how I was going to get back home. But instead of stressing about money, I just walked around the city, took some pictures, wrote in my journal a bit, and played guitar on street corners. I ended up meeting a homeless college dropout named Marshall; he told me where to go to get food and shower, and he showed me his favorite places to sleep. Through him, I met two cool punks named Mission and Cory. We all went to the Swannanoa River together and swam and drank forties of Cobra and had a blast, just living entirely in the moment and not worrying about superficial bullshit like how we looked or how much money we didn't have. Mission suggested we go to Virginia Beach in Chevy Chase the Chevy Tracker (RIP, road dog -- you will always be my favorite car). We spanged up the money for gas, and off we went, singing along to every track on
American Beauty while smoking buy-one-get-one-free packs of Camel Filters and drinking cans of PBR.
Virginia Beach is beautiful. Mission and I played guitar on the boardwalk while Cory accompanied us on his banjo. We met beautiful Russian women who sang for us in return for us singing for them. We slept on the roof of an abandoned restaurant, and I woke up to the most astounding sunrise I've ever seen (I wish I could describe it to you, but words wouldn't do it justice).
A few months later, I took another trip from Georgia to North Carolina, but this time my destination was Charlotte. Charlotte didn't enchant me as much as Asheville (I don't believe any place ever will), but it was a nice place to spend some time. From there I travelled to New Jersey, where I met an internet friend and rode a train over to NYC. In NYC, my travel companion Jesse and I met a group of gutterpunks who shared their vodka and orange juice with us. Then we met some Latino gangbanger kids who bought us more vodka and cheap beer. We ate free chicken at KFC. We ended up on St. Mark's Ave, where we shared a forty with a girl who knew one of our friends from Atlanta. I marvelled about how small the world really was. We slept off the excessive booze on a sofa-bed graciously offered to us by a gay couple who were apartment-sitting. They made us tea and let us play the piano and electric guitar. In the morning I smoked a cigarette on the fire escape because I had always daydreamed about smoking cigarettes on a fire escape at an apartment in Greenwich Village.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is experiences mean more to me than clothes. Memories of conversations with people are more meaningful than memories of what I wore (though I do remember the outfit I wore in New York: checkered, slip on Vans with cut-off shorts and a blue shirt that cost $2.99 on the clearance rack at Heritage 1981 -- I also remember the way the sun faded that shirt, so it was three different shades of blue eventually, instead of just the one). Writing a fashion blog seems silly when there are so many more exciting things to dedicate my thoughts to. But sometimes it's good to focus on silly things; I mean, life is short, so we should enjoy the silly while we can, right? Those might be conflicting messages. The point I'm making is this blog has been quiet for some time, and during that time I have been doing some thinking and adventuring and prioritizing. I will keep updating this blog and reading fashion blogs, but my posts aren't going to be entirely fashion-focused anymore (because I am not entirely fashion-focused, and I want this part of the Internet to be an extension of myself).
