"this pain / it is a glacier moving through you / and carving out deep valleys"

As you can tell from my icon,* I am a tall, thin man. Not so tall that I wear specialty size clothing, but taller than average.

Or so it used to be: lately, stores where I've long been able to buy slacks suitable for work no longer carry my size, or do so intermittently at best. My waist in a shorter leg or my length in a wider girth, sure, but not both together. (Jeans, for some reason, are still readily found in my size.) Since this is the same size I've been for over a decade, the result is feeling I have been defined as outside the norm. Like I've been kicked out. Declared abnormal. Excluded.

This is something I must remember, when privilege, especially its loss or absence, comes up. Remember and extrapolate onto actually significant aspects of life.

* Though it's been a few years since that photo was taken, I still look more or less the same, minus the mustache.

---L.

Subject quote from "Glacier," John Grant. The next line is "and creating spectacular landscapes".