I dislike the pretentiousness of neck ties. I have a few patterns that put a sparkle in my eye, but you can't clean them, and if you aren't ultra-careful with them, they crinkle. They seem to be built with falling apart quickly in mind. Wear one a few times and the label starts decomposing visibly from the underside, protruding from your careful neck-hanging arrangement. Solitary threads holding ends and seams together come out like roaches on a warm night. I've never seen such an excuse for charging undeserved money. Given that you can't wash them, they should be indestructible: I have similar trousers that I've been washing, drying, and sporting carelessly since 1999. Finally, oh finally: you wrap one around your neck in a slipknot, as if in a totem to your employer's power of life and death over you. This is supposed to make people take you seriously as superior to the average human. The tomfoolery of the act of tie-hanging has never rested on shaky ground, even when I have found my ego buoyed by it, even when I have gone sunning in the glow of the "discipline" of presentation, displaying cooperativeness with the effort of maintaining all this. Just because the ruse of status works on other humans, and quite consistently, and even works sometimes to fool ourselves, we can't conclude that it's non-ludicrous. I'd happily burn all my ties and wear a tail to work instead.

When my brother and I did Tae Kwon Do, we wore colorful belts. Tying one on made you feel calm and proud because you'd won it in pain and performance. When the color was black, the instructor taught you a new way to tie your belt that was more elaborate and looked better, more symmetrical. The knot seemed to enfold meaning and flowed with the uniforms, flags, bows, calls-and-responses, moments of meditation, and warm-ups of putting on a role. You wore your belt for a reason that had applied in every lesson. You led more of the exercises. When belts wore in, they'd show sand-colored underlying fabric in a way that felt elegant, even a little intimidating. You knew because you had been intimidated yourselves, then flat out-sparred. They could be washed occasionally if carefully and otherwise accumulated sweat. They were sewn, it seemed, even stronger than your exertions.