Chattanooga Pulse

In my pants pockets at this very moment, as always, are three things and three things only: my car keys, iPhone and wallet. With those three vital tools alone, I can control my entire universe.

Clear entry into transportation and housing. E-mail, text and voice communication with anyone I can imagine. Access to the wonderful free-flowing information on the Internet. A virtual notepad, MP3s of my favorite music and digital photos of my family and friends—plus a digital camera to take more. Credit and debit purchasing power, a driver’s license, AAA protection, insurance coverage and business cards just in case I meet a potential client. I even have postage stamps, a bottle opener and potentially up to $10 in cash at any given moment. All of this can be found neatly tucked within three of my four pants pockets.

Why then, would anyone need to haul around anything else? Business people need briefcases I suppose. But you can tell those who really need a bag, and those who just carry one to dupe their bosses into believing that they actually plan to continue working after a short break to eat dinner and watch Lost.

Hipsters carry around backpacks and man bags. Some want you to believe that they are mysteriously homeless or might have to bolt for days on end at any given moment. I’m pretty sure those useless parcels contain one or more of the following: a flannel shirt, a filthy toothbrush, a spiral notebook (with drawings and poetry), a packet of loose cigarette tobacco and papers, a striped-sleeve polyester jogging jacket and/or army jacket with at least one Black Flag and/or Ramones button proudly pinned on the collar and a dog-eared copy of Naked Lunch, On The Road and/or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

However, nothing can prepare the male of the species for that mysterious black hole known as the female handbag. For it’s this fashion accessory full of random stuff that is likely the most puzzling combination of swag known to humankind.

First off, please refer back to the first two paragraphs. All of those handy conveniences can also be found in the female purse. However, ladies require the storage volume of a small piece of luggage for those things to in any way be “portable”.

Take women’s keys. They don’t just have a car key and house key on a simple ring. They have a carabineer that’s hooking together at least eight rings of keys to every lock they’ve ever had access to and fobs from every vacation destination they’ve ever visited—plus a bottle opener, mace can and rape whistle. It’s a tangled mess of metal weighing in at no less than two pounds.

Then there’s the wallet. Checkbook size with at least ten credit cards, a copy of every financial document they’ve received in the last six months plus coupons and gift cards for a few more. And if that’s not enough, covering up the iPhone or Blackberry they must check every five seconds, lay the other sundries a woman requires in order to leave the house—make-up bag, hair brush, digital camera, photo album, sunglasses, other pair of sunglasses, glasses, hair clip, lip gloss and of course, gum.

The fact that oversized purses are now the fashion should seemingly make it easier for a woman to keep up with all of these items. Nothing doing.  Even with this functional nap sack for their stuff, a woman can still go out for a night on the town and lose roughly half of their belongings over the course of the evening.
Because when your primary concern is how you look dancin’ on a speaker with a shot in each hand, you tend to forget about where any of your stuff is at any given moment. A guy can do a quick “pocket pat” to make sure that phone, wallet and keys are on board.

A woman, however, will separate her most vitally important, life-sustaining items into other people’s pockets, the bar table, under the bar table, the bar table over there, the bar, her car, your car, the first and last place you visited and/or the couch cushions where you were making out with her (but didn’t make it past second base before she passed out).

Then when morning comes and sobriety kicks in, she’ll immediately panic and surmise that her lack of reason during the night makes you accountable for helping her find all of this stuff which NOW seems so important to locate. And guys just go along with it, because that’s our job. But hey, we’d all be lost without our “stuff,” now wouldn’t we?

Chuck Crowder is a local writer and general man about town. His opinions are just that. Everything expressed is loosely based on fact, and crap he hears people talking about. Take what you just read with a grain of salt, but pepper it in your thoughts. And be sure to check out his popular website www.thenoog.com