Today, I went clothes shopping.

This was an event.

It was an event because I have purchased two shirts since I moved from Arizona some eight months ago, one of which was at a flea market, and the other of which was a Digger shirt and thus doesn’t really count as a purchase.

In Arizona, I purchased several shirts. At a thrift store. Generally for about a buck a piece.

I do not think I have bought a new shirt at an actual store-store since…um…possibly when I lived in Minnesota, when I lived down the street from the greatest clothing store of all time, a small locally-owned hole in the wall specializing in batik, which I miss.

I purchase jeans a bit more regularly, since I have a bizarre talent for losing jeans. Somewhere in my closet, lost for centuries, is the Secret Jeans Burial Ground. Someday, I’ll stumble down an unexpected corridor, dodge blow gun wielding natives and spring-loaded pungi sticks, and in a dusty room carved with ancient sacrificial rites, a single beam of sunlight will stab down onto a dusty dais, and reveal a folded stack of worn denim. I will haul them back to the surface, past the natives and the giant rolling rock and the pit traps, and then discover that the extra fifteen pounds I’ve gained since college have made ’em look like blue sausauge casings for my thighs.

But I digress.

So anyway, my current wardrobe is a hodge-podge of ancient T-shirts and slightly less ancient T-shirts, (generally in the ever popular “Black with something on it” theme) some vests that I haven’t worn since my corporate days, a number of generally undistinguished knit tops that were purchased during said college days and are often not made for the fact that a cousin of those fifteen rogue pounds went into making me a C-cup, one really nice black suit for funerals that goddamn well better fit the next time someone dies, and a bunch of vaguely Hawaiian and batik shirts. I am a terrible sucker for batik.

I should really go clean the closet out and donate the stuff I won’t wear again, but that feels a lot like “moving” and “packing” and I’m still working through my phobias there. And c’mon, discovering how much stuff no longer fits you is not a big self-esteem builder.

So, finally, went shopping. I just got the biggest paycheck of my life, paid off my taxes, put a lot into savings, I deserve to blow fifty bucks on clothes. (This sort of girly expenditure racks me with guilt the way that, say, buying video games does not.) So I braved the horror of The Mall, found some nice stuff at 75% off. I suspect that the reason that otherwise serviceable clothing was marked down to 6$ from $50 had to do with the brand name. I cannot imagine middle aged women rushing out to buy “Sag Harbor” brand. I hope they fired the marketing guy.

And now, having purchased shirts, I will probably not buy any more until I move AGAIN. Which, god willing, will be a long, long time from now.