In Defense of Bow Ties

In his new book, David Sedaris disembowels the bowtie by calling it an announcement to the world that you can no longer get an erection. I both love and despise Sedaris because he’s a very good writer, but I feel compelled to defend the bowtie.

I have worn one occasionally. It’s an odd choice, I know. A 80 year old saleman I had the pleasure of knowing once gave me a bowtie as a thank you gift. I wore it in his honor, and kind of liked it. I still wear it from time to time, but I still struggle with it.

It’s geeky to be sure. Certainly I don’t believe it would qualify as sexy. Unless of course paired with a tuxedo. But for daily wear, it’s anachronistic, dorky with a certain Orville-ian under tones. I get a range of responses when I wear one. I get bemused looks, stares. Some will say it’s fun. Some will say, “It’s you.” Which I think might be a back-handed insult.

I’d like to think it marks you a different, thoughtful…the smartest guy in the room. Or perhaps, the geekiest. I remember once in elementary school, at the beginning of my descent into unpopularity, the other kids started calling me a nerd. I was wounded but more so, I was outraged. I thought that secretly I was just as good if not better than any of them. It was ridiculously unfair and innaccurate to call me such a name. I decided after one particularly brutal bus ride home that if they wanted a nerd I would give them one. Clearly they didn't know what a real nerd was. Perhaps I could help them see the difference. And so in deaf to my mother’s pleading, I parted my hair down the middle and spackled it in place with palmful after palmful of mouse until my hair gleamed like plastic. Not satisfied with the effect and eager for more self-inflicted pain, I taped up the nose of my glasses. You want a nerd? You got one.

It was a terrible decision. A classroom of fourth graders is like Lord of the Flies with Erasers and Notebooks in place of Conch Shells. Nobody understood the statement I was trying to make, it only served to cement and justify the original verdict. I never recovered socially and served out my time in public school with the other freaks and geeks.

I consoled myself with the knowledge that I wasn’t really a nerd, that was the label they assigned me. I was much, much more, they were just too blind and stupid to see. In my wildly dramatic pubescent years I would imagine the most popular people in my class realizing the error of their ways in a variety of convenient scenarios. One week it was a terrorist attack at school where I saved the day. Another it was an earthquake or a tornado, always some cataclysmic event that up ended the social structure and created an opportunity for me to shine and recreate myself. To my dismay, the apocalyptic event I fervently wished for never happened. Embittered, I took solace in my own company. While painful at the time, it freed me to some extent from the tyranny of the herd, but also fueled a compensatory superiority complex. Overtime, as my wife and most people who know me will tell you, I fell quite in love with myself. An affair which continues to this day.

Maybe that’s part of what a bowtie is to me: defiant, self -segregating, a little arrogant. I’ll wear a bowtie if I want to, I’ll blaze my own fashion trail. You’ll come to appreciate both it and me if this building’s hit by an asteroid.

Just knowing how to tie one, enforces a feeling of superiority. Men will ask, “Is real bowtie?” I’ll smugly reply, “Yes, it is…I tied it myself. I know lots of things. Grand things. Things you’ll never know because while you were with all the other cool kids, I was at the library….becoming awesome.”