Traversing the Wasteland

“’What’s the bravest thing you ever did?’
He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. ‘Getting up this morning,’ he said.”

– Cormac McCarthy, The Road

2012 is well underway.  The New Year – that burning ember of fledgling hope – is, despite itself, stumbling towards maturity.

Promises and resolutions abound with every new beginning, and – if you’re human – you or someone you love has almost certainly fucked up a few times this year.

(Already!)

Which is, of course, typical and fine.  My wish for you is that you’ve made your mistakes valiantly, whatever they may be.   Why not, after all?

Like it or not, the future is now.

2012 is indeed “supposed” to be the year in which we all – collectively – pack it in and wind up the Doomsday clock.  Stock the cellar, batten down the hatches, and throw up our hands in a rhapsodic display of stubborn capitulation.  Xibalba or bust!  Which is, as sentiments go, perhaps more WWN than WWD, but I don’t care.  According to the movies and the teevee, they do tend to have great style on the Wasteland.

Like this ensemble here.

I found this Alex Wang jacket while foraging through the wreckage at a Neiman’s Last Call, and  – all sly and cunning-like – it called to me immediately.  I suppressed my instinctive desire to seize it outright and passed it by, only to return the following week to find it still there.  Hidden within the rack.  Watching.  Waiting.  I succumbed, enfolded it in my heart of hearts and called it my own.

I enjoy the severity of the stand-up collar, and the way the pinstriped wool grazes the top of my thigh (for me, a great proportion).  I enjoy the way it has these two little tabs that wrap around my heart and fasten in the back, creating this vaguely bondage-ey effect that makes me feel like a postmodern warrior queen.

Companions on The Road we became.  This was last September.

(I can only hope I am as stubborn and impulsive on the Wasteland as I am in the office and affairs of…well, say love, for example.  Oh, whoops, did I say “love?”  I mean, style…yes, style…)

Well.  A tenacious spirit is always in style.

Dear friends: great love, like great fashion, is like Zombieland: “You’ve got to nut up, or shut up.”

So be kind and true to all your companions, sartorial or otherwise.  Don’t abandon them on The Road; rather, dry clean them and buy them dinner.  It is never a little thing when someone or something has your back.

Be kind and true.  

Keep your word.

So that even if you stumble, and even if you fall – even if someone lets you down and you wake up tomorrow in the Post-Apocalypse – you may then pick yourself up and launch yourself forward, with soul bared and middle finger raised.

So that you may – in the words of Mr. McCarthy – “Carry the fire.”

The Wasteland is no place for acquiescence, after all.  No room to hesitate.

Come the Rapture, I’ll take your shoes.

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

– Cormac McCarthy,  All the Pretty Horses

Outfit: Jacket, Alexander Wang; Shoes, Jeffrey Campbell; Shorts, American Apparel; Tank with garters (unclipped), Kiki de Montparnasse.

Photos by Mike Andrick.