I bought it at the Eddie Bauer outlet in Gilroy on the way down to the 2004 Holiday Bowl. \u00a0It was on ridiculous sale post-Christmas, as were the other three or four jackets we bought (including one which became the international travel coat in 2005 and 2007) – but those all had practical applications. \u00a0To this day, I\u2019m not sure why I thought I needed a suede trucker jacket.<\/p>\n
In retrospect, I think it had something to do with wanting to make a clean break from the person I\u2019d been in DC six months earlier – burned out by the rage and wanting to change how I lived. \u00a0And while the Indiana Jones jacket was and is one of my most prized possessions, it felt like I needed to change up the look if I were going to regenerate, and so I bought the suede. Button-up, of course, and the sleeves were a little big and baggy like a 90s sweater, but the pockets were deeper than the hand warmer pockets on the Indy jacket, and it was something called \u201cSeattle Suede\u201d which you could throw in the washing machine, and I just went with it.<\/p>\n
I wore it off and on for three or four years, through my time working in Cupertino and during the brief ill-fated sojourn in government subcontracting. And it never looked quite<\/em> right to me, somehow. It was heavier than the Indy jacket, for one, which made it about the heaviest thing I could practically wear without reverting to snow-wear. \u00a0Something about it was strongly suggestive of the pilot jackets from the original Battlestar Galactica, and not in a good way. Still, it was warm and cozy, and in the right light and with the right steel-toe boots and flat cap was oddly suggestive of leaning against the bar at a public house somewhere in York, or Kildare, or Greenock.<\/p>\n But then time happened, as the wife says, and the more I looked at it, the less I felt right in it. \u00a0It looked like somebody trying to be something they weren\u2019t, somehow. \u00a0It just didn\u2019t seem to suit me. \u00a0And this time last year, I stuffed it in the crawlspace with another jacket once I was given the black Filson number for Christmas. \u00a0And since I didn\u2019t get it out, it\u2019s time to donate it – which is exactly what I did. \u00a0It and two other jackets went to a Legal Aid collection in Napa where they will find their way to somebody who needs a coat to be a coat rather than a random talisman of memories they\u2019re not altogether sure about.<\/p>\n There may be a lesson in there, if I\u2019m bright enough to figure it out, but I\u2019m not altogether sure I am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I bought it at the Eddie Bauer outlet in Gilroy on the way down to the 2004 Holiday Bowl. \u00a0It was on ridiculous sale post-Christmas, as were the other three or four jackets we bought (including one which became the international travel coat in 2005 and 2007) – but those all had practical applications. \u00a0To … <\/p>\n