Dressing the part

My old jacket.

I think for Retroactive tonight I will dress the part. I've been kicking around in my old Ramones T-shirt (which is about as old as Mike whom I will be meeting there) all day and figure I can throw on some tight black jeans, my über-pointy 'Vogs and my old peace-punk biker jacket. It is genuine '80's, and an ongoing project up until about 1995. I don't think there is a single original stitch in it, since over the years that I used to wear it daily it endured:

• Being thrown into a turtle tank that I drunkenly mistook for a coffee table and left to soak for hours
• Used to get over barbed-wire fences
• Doused in gasoline after accidentally knocking the fuel line off a VW I was working on
• Doused in salt water after drunkenly falling off a dock
• Had more alcohol spilled on it than the floor behind the bar at the Twilight Zone.

The first few safety pins were just to hold it together. On the shoulders are the Canadian Flag and the "Canada" patch from my old combat uniform, the safety-pin peace symbol is meant to represent the tenuousness of peace and the important rôle of peace-keepers, the knotted dragons underneath represent the conflicts that are always brewing, and the "Araneum" is more recent, a reference to my old website (originally started in 1994). It was painted over what used to be an "N" on a spider-web, which was an old alt.gothic symbol for "Net.Goth" in the days before the Web and Netscape.

i used to get strange people running their fingers up and down my spine, playing with the pins, when I wore this on the bus. I can't even begin to tell you how many times people thought they were being clever when they asked for a safety pin. What's really fun now is you can tell it is the genuine article because the brass safety pins (the inner lines of the peace symbol) are very dull and brown now and the others have all begun to rust. All the snaps rusted shut a long time ago (the turtle tank and falling in the ocean took care of that, I imagine, not to mention all the rainy nights selling jewellery on Granville either on my back or Dianna's). Yeah... I've had a lot of fun in that jacket.