Belt Story

I am a rather slender man. I'm also someone who is rather inept at determining my dimensions and selecting properly-sized clothes. So it is then that one of the most important elements of my wardrobe is my belt. I tend to be rather hard on belts, which is a thing you might expect of someone with greater girth, but there it is. Belts often have just a few holes in them, and a person is expected to fall within that narrow range of waist circumference. I often don't.

What's nice are those woven belts, the ones that are made from several threads of leather. They're good because you have a basically limitless number of ready-made places to cinch the belt to. Regrettably, they are not the be-all and end-all of fashion, and it is to my never-ending chagrin that this is so. All other types of belts are more difficult to use, and I am not the type to wear suspenders, although I did do so in my younger days.

I favor leather belts over those of any particular fabric. Ideally it has a hole that corresponds to my waist, but even if it does that will eventually change. It always seems to be that I notice the problem when I am in a hurry and on the move. There's just no time to remove the belt in order to make a new hole. This goes against the things I was taught in Boy Scouts (although they never spoke specifically on the subject of punching holes in belts), but I just make a new hole in the thing while I'm wearing it.

The good news is that when I someday start growing fatter, I won't have to go through this again. I'll just have the holes that I was shrinking past. I guess that is some of a representation of the circle of life (even if it is something of a perversion of it on my part). I started out small, grew a good number of belt notches larger, presently am fluctuating back and forth, and will at some point lose the lifelong battle with my metabolism and go bigger and bigger until my last day. The whole story is there in the belt.