Every couple years or so I switch from a shoulder bag to a backpack (or vice versa). When I weary of a shoulder bag, I long for something that will distribute weight more evenly across my back. When I tire of a backpack, I yearn to carry my things in something that won’t make me feel as if I were in seventh grade.
A few months ago, I decided it was time to retire the trusty shoulder bag that had seen me through good times and bad since 2004. However, my search for a backpack to take its place in my affections proved to be more frustrating than I had expected. The bag store where I had bought my shoulder bag had closed, and every time I went into a sporting goods store I was overwhelmed by the complexity, size, and technological subtlety of the backpacks on offer. They had pockets and zippers and straps whose purpose I could not fathom, and/or they were capacious enough to hold any number of corpses I might not wish to leave in plain sight, and/or they featured heated compartments or MP3 players or built-in emergency flares. I was interested in none of these (except for the room for the corpses, but those ones really looked ridiculous on my rather small frame). I had almost given up and resigned myself to a life of back problems.
Then I walked into Staples and saw this:
I bought it at once. I am now happier than I have been since learning that Tycho Brahe died not from accidental mercury poisoning via his alchemical experiments but because he was poisoned by his protegé Johannes Kepler, the father of astronomy (among other things).
E.S. expressed his concern that the people living in the crack house two doors down might not react with unmitigated enthusiasm to a pink and silver backpack. Here I played my ace in the hole: the people in the crack house two doors down love me. They call me Jimmy, after Jimmy Olsen, Clark Kent’s enthusiastic if not overly penetrating sidekick at The Daily Planet. Whenever I walk by, they tell me to have a blessed day. They will love the pink and silver backpack too.
Now I just need to find some unicorn and rainbow stickers to put on it, preferably puffy ones.
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