The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

All you tech-savvy readers out there probably are way ahead of me on this, but I just read than now clothes are being digitized. Sports bras with heart rate monitors, Levi jackets with connectivity to music devices, yoga pants with tingle activators to correct posture. The entire fashion industry may soon be wired. This is great news for androids maybe … and those of us who apparently (apparelly?) want to emulate replicants.

Not that there aren’t obvious benefits to us homo sapiens. Underwear that delivers electric shocks after not being changed regularly. Pants that can zip themselves up. Or lock down in sexual harassment office situations and if need be deliver additional electric shocks. Self-cleaning handkerchiefs! Programmable shirts that change color with your mood. (Remember those mood rings — way ahead of their time!)

Pardon me if I don’t share the same level of excitement as my Zumba-spandexed wired-in-the-crotch fellow South Enders following the fashion trends of Silicone Valley. Although, I remember when Wisconsin deer hunters and Green Bay Packer fans delighted to battery warmed socks. No doubt the circuitry of today’s woolen hosiery would make those early prototypes look clunky and quaint. And who knows how many lives were lost to electrocution than toes to frostbite.

Personally I don’t want my clothes to be too smart. Almost everything around me now is ‘smart’, wirelessly scanning the internet for further updates, leaving me so far behind I probably show as a ghost on GPS. The last thing I need in this digitized interconnected society is my hat telling me what to do, where to go, how to better accessorize. A hat, I hope, is just a hat. And if, as some say, it makes the man, let’s leave it at that. I sure don’t want it giving me instructions, shocks or directions, just keep the rain off my empty head.

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