Do YOU love it? …I love it! …I got it at ROSS.

I am (usually) not one to toot my own horn, but there are moments when I have written truly hilarious/fantastic things — little nuggets of ultra-dense, referential humor that usually only I (or some other with a similar level of obscure interests) get. But this is FUNNY, right? And every American has shopped at Ross Dress For Less at some point in their lives, right?

This is a Yelp review of mine from when I lived in Seattle:

Ross and I have a long history and I usually don’t like to talk about it; it’s a sore subject.

Most people my age either malign Ross entirely or pretend they don’t know Ross, but I’m not afraid. Those postmodern futuristic letters of pure azure have been a part of my life ever since my frills-are-for-families-with-functioning-fathers lower-middle-class mother gave me the choice of a) buying one thing from the brand name department store or b) buying three things from some guy who specializes in misshapen, oblong, factory rejects that are two years démodé.

I always went with option A, but somehow, my mother would always ‘miss’ the exit for the mall and we’d end up at Ross Dress For Less. I swear, she must have paid the liquidation costs of Generra Hypercolor alone with the amount of out-of-spec neon pink t-shirts I demanded. I was the proud owner of two Mexican Baja jackets, not just one, because Ross piled ‘em high like cornhusks too gristly for ethanol.

Truly, Ross is a corporate expression of the postmodern crisis. Someone forgot to tell their design department (ha!) that Kathie Lee was dropped from the Regis masthead a decade ago, and that white horizontal stripes scream “Massengill” and not “Mossimo”.

But Ross has to be loved for its American exceptionalism — the audacity of trying to line up XXXL pink lady negliges in a straight line is quite frankly a sign of madness. Yet we keep on buying. The thought of having to work there makes me almost avoid it — can you imagine what loss prevention, or inventory management, or god forbid, vendor relations must be like?

The secret to Ross’ success is that they who work for Ross must cherish the madness — they know things get stolen and how people steal them, they know exactly what they’re doing when they price an untagged pair of underwear lower than they really sell for, they know the staffing roster is designed to create the long lines, not eradicate them.

You see, Ross is a sham, an intentional, profitable sham, and that’s why I love it. The factories make ‘irregular’ clothing on purpose in order to hedge their large-scale investments in raw fabric — this allows them to maintain high margins at Macy’s while benefiting from the economy of scale. It also allows them to have a more flexible margin of error for quality control.

Ross is entirely complicit in its role as well — it takes these unwanted unmentionables and scatters them in a drab, outdated linear framework, with narrow aisles and awkward merchandising priorities (why are the dishes and pots and heavy things down where it’s hard to bring a shopping cart?). It does this on purpose to give you the image of the last-chance bazaar, to make you feel rewarded for hunting through 8 XXXL’s to find the M.

And how bazaar it is — there are a lot of freaks who hang out at the downtown location. But there are also the best finds — I have pretty much developed an entire underwear fetish based on the fact that $30 designer units often go for $5. Open my bureau drawer and you’d think “gosh this dude spends a lot of money on socks and underwear”, but to them I say, “Do you love it? I love it! I got it at ROSS.”

In short, Ross is about knowing the strategy, the rationale, and coming prepared to outwit them. Bring a book, bring your iPod, leave your claustrophobia and embarrassment behind, and get used to fighting with 4’9″ immigrant ladies for the last pair of god knows what. It’s the American way!

(Author’s note: I did use the word ‘postmodern’ a bit too frequently.)

My argument consisted of a fallacy, the classic “post hoc” fallacy - after this, therefore because of this. I blamed Seattle for most of my problems at the time. I now know this to be completely undeserved, because my problems accompanied me to Austin. It’s not Seattle’s ‘fault’ that I happened to live there during a particularly tough time in my life. After all, a city is not a person. After all, I was born there. It’s as much a hometown as Austin is.

Now that I have the benefit of clarity that comes from hindsight, I’ve been looking at the pictures I took during my time there — I was truly on the edge, and the photos reflect it. Yet they show a remarkable patience that I won’t likely see again.

Half the fun of revisiting these photos is reading the captions I attached to them at the time (they’re all on Flickr — from August 2008 to March 2009, I took 2,240 pictures; 575 in November 2008 alone!) The captions give away little hints as to how I was really feeling at the time.

The last picture tells the most.

So I have the right to be just a little sad that the Taco Time on Madison Street is finally going out of business.  It’s probably the first place I ever had a taco, 20 years or more ago, back when that stretch of Madison was more industrial in nature and almost run down.  It was the Central District back then, Capitol Hill now, and by virtue of being in between two very different neighborhoods, suffered from an identity crisis. But I always loved Madison Street because it was a 30 degree angle on a cityscape that otherwise attempted (in vain, mostly due to the hills) to force right angles at every other intersection.

Speaking of 30 degree angles, the Taco Time was famous for something other than ersatz Mexicana (Mexi-fries, anyone?)  The building possesses fantastic 1960’s faux A-frame architecture, with windows that seem to creep up towards the sky at regular intervals just like Madison itself (going from sea level to 450 feet in a matter of 1.5 miles).  I always loved the building for its homey, squat interpretation of mid century modernism, even if I certainly didn’t know what mid-century meant as an 8 year old.

So I’m kind of proud that this picture I took exactly 1 year 2 days ago, on November 12 of 2008, was used by a few local blogs to illustrate the fact that Taco Time was going out of business. The building is a bit small to be used as anything but a small shop or fast food place, so I am a bit nervous that the building will be demolished, and with it, a piece of pop-architectural mastery. But unlike Austin, Seattle tends to have a better galvanized preservationist community, so I hope it outlives Taco Time’s custodianship of the building.

I know, because I’m originally from Seattle!  Thank you, Hunter for finding this.

They say that megapixels aren’t everything, and that is entirely correct, but it still doesn’t account for the fact that my Canon G10 is a technically superior camera to the 7 megapixel Optio S70Z in every way. If I still had that camera, if I hadn’t dropped it on the ice in January, I would still be using it. I look at my photos from back then and I feel tiny bits of the emotion contained therein, not just because I remember being there, but because the eerie tenor of the photos is one of the few examples where something entirely digital felt as analog as life.

Some of the more ethereal moments: