Writing Makes Your Pants Shrink
I've got proof!
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I am a born minimalist. When I was a kid in Boy Scouts, I used to make lists of the essential items you’d need to live. Of course, everything had to fit in my backpack. (Yes, I was a strange child.)
If you come over to my house today, you’d wonder if I were lying about the minimalist thing. That’s because I’m married to a maximalist. The two of us together end up being more of a messimalist than anything else.
I’m not going to get into my wife’s love for objects. Her entire life is written in the objects she’s collected over the decades. I’m pretty sure I’ve covered that territory before here on Substack. Besides, she’s not here to defend herself. (She doesn’t know about the Substack. Basically, Substack is kind of like my side chick, writer-wise. And, in case you wonder, my wife isn’t worried about my side chick, writer-wise or otherwise. 😉 )
But as usual, I meander.
Ah, yes, back to the minimalist thing.
So, in our bedroom, my wife has the entire closet, a chest of drawers (otherwise known as a chesterdrawers here in the South), and quite a few piles of clothes and shoes, and God knows what lying around. Me? I keep my entire wardrobe in my own chesterdrawers. And it’s not even full. Come rain, come shine, my wardrobe consists of shorts in the summer, jeans in the winter, undies and socks, and probably six or so T-shirts. I have two pairs of jeans. I also own two pairs of shoes. God forbid someone I care about dies. I’d have to spend a bloody fortune at the men’s store!
Periodically, I clean out my meager collection of clothes and take what I don’t want to Goodwill. Periodically, my wife and her sister go to the store and buy more clothes without taking anything to Goodwill. Or they just stop at Goodwill, where they can really stock up.
But, but, but…
The other day, I pulled out the bottom drawer in my chesterdrawers and found two pairs of cargo pants that I had forgotten about and loved. Where the heck had they been? Why hadn’t I been wearing them? I love, love, love cargo pants. They are the pants version of fishing vests with all the pockets and such. (BTW, remind me to write sometime about fishing vests. I’ve got a lot to say.)
So, I pulled out the two pairs of cargo pants and immediately put them on. What the heck? It wasn’t that they were tight; it was that I couldn’t squeeze my fat enough to button the damn things. Yeah, yeah, I have been to the doctor recently, and he weighed me. A little over what I used to be last time I was weighed. (But that was before the invention of battery-operated, digital scales. And before the end of the last century.)
I pulled the offending pants off and sat down on my bed in wonderment. What the heck could have happened?
Then I figured it out.
Writing causes your pants to shrink.
Yeah, that’s it by-gosh! Writing not only causes your pants to shrink, but how much they shrink is in direct proportion to how much you write. And I’ve been writing a ton over the past few years. So, no wonder.
But you know me. See rabbit hole, go down rabbit hole.
I got on ChatGPT and queried it about this phenomenon.
Here’s what he, she, it had to say:
The causal link between writing and pants shrinkage has been noted over the centuries by quite a few writers. Cervantes, who was put in jail on numerous occasions (not including the five years he was a slave in Algiers…I kid you not!), noted that his pants shrank quite a bit the last time he was in jail (gaol). This was when he penned Don Quixote, and stands in contrast to his other stints in the big house.
Encogiéronseme los calzones—Cervantes’s own words in 16th century Spanish.
Or, Se me encogieron los pantalones, modern day Spanish…
Or, translated into 21st Century American English… Hey Bro! What the hell happened to my pants?
Take your pick.
There have been other writers who’ve noticed (and written about) the same thing, especially ones who were prolific, as you can imagine. Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, even Stephen King. Looking at their pictures, you might not agree with what I’m telling you. I mean, you can look at the pictures of these guys, and two of them are thin, Dickens and King, but scholars have investigated those photos. They are apparently all deep fakes. I didn’t know they could do deep fakes in the 19th Century, but apparently, at least in England, they could.
If you look up at the top of this essay, you’ll see a picture of Rodin’s statue of Balzac. Balzac was big in all respects. His magnum opus, La Comédie humaine, The Human Comedy, clocks in at over 90 finished words, estimated to be over three million mots (that’s French for “words”). Five times longer than War and Peace. So even though Napoleon couldn’t conquer Russia, the French have them beat in wordiness.
Balzac’s statue is heroic-sized. I’ve seen it. I’ve actually stood there mesmerized by it. It’s on a plinth, as you see in the photo above, and then there’s Balzac wrapped in a cloak. Why the cloak? Not sure. I’m not an art historian, but Balzac often worked in a sort of housecoat. Or maybe it was to emphasize the magnitude of the man. Balzac was huge in all respects. He ate hugely, drank hugely, probably womanized hugely. He was a massive workaholic. His publishers hated giving him the final drafts of his books to check before the print run because he would, pen in hand, correct the draft and send it back to the publisher to be set again.
I guess what I’m saying is writing all those three million-plus words made Balzac’s pants shrink down to almost toddler-size. His pants shrank much more than my cargo pants shrank. Makes sense. He published far more than me…so far. 😉
Unlike me, Balzac was not a minimalist in any sense. Well, honestly, I’ve not been inside his house, which is now a museum. It’s right there in an upscale section of Paris called Passy. The first time I went to Paris, I stayed with my mother’s cousin, who worked for the Embassy. She had a killer apartment in Passy. The first walk I ever took in Paris, I walked right by Balzac’s house, although I didn’t know it at the time. But I was a kid then, twenty, and I hadn’t written that much. A few really bad poems. So, at the time, my pants fit just fine.
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