On zippers

I’ve never liked them and never will. I buy jeans with buttons. My dislike of zippers is almost visceral, and certainly irrational. As a child I had a strange fear of catching a finger in my jacket zipper, and I had an even stronger fear that the zipper would jam, and that while trying to fix it, the zipper just came apart with the zipper thingy engaged about half way up, impossible to move either up or down. This is a recurring nightmare I had as a child. In this nightmare a small bit of cloth would get stuck in the zipper and jam the entire works to the point where only a knife or scissors were the only solutions. How many times have you gone out and left your fly open, your zipper unzipped? This is every man’s fashion nightmare dysfunction–to walk around for hours, perhaps the entire day, and have your wife say, “Your zipper is open. You walk around all day like that? Zippers are everywhere: pants, tents, coats, sleeping bags, backpacks, suitcases, windbreakers, shoes, jackets, boots, bags,wet suits, and purses. The whole secret to using a zipper is getting the two sides to interlock before pulling up the zipper, which can be sexy, but if you are little klutzy, it’s a real disaster. For most people this is an unconscious action which they do every day without even thinking about it. Without even thinking about it, that is, until something goes wrong: the material rips, something gets stuck, the zipper zips without connecting properly to the other side. What is terribly annoying are the people who see you have a disaster, and they offer help: “Oh, heavens, I can help with that!” But they can’t. They try everything, including force, to get the zipper unstuck, to bring it back to normal, to restore symmetry, but the only thing that they succeed at is making it worse. You pull the mess up over your head to relieve yourself of a jacket that won’t zip. Perhaps if you can take a look, you might solve the problem. If the zipper in your pants breaks, you are sincerely up the proverbial creek without paddle because trying to unstick a jammed zipper in the groin area is not only strange and weird, but it must be done in private. You can’t walk around the mall with a jammed zipper on your pants and try to work it out. A jacket with a broken zipper is no longer a jacket, and a backpack with a jammed zipper is both useless and a doorstop. The mechanical device that we know as the zipper is not even a hundred years old, dating in its various forms from the beginning of the twentieth century, so it’s not like this imperfect invention has threatened humanity for that long. The hypothesis for its use is good: close and hold together to pieces of fabric or rubber or canvas for a variable amount of time. In reality, if it fails, breaks, or jams, swearing ensues in which the victim challenges the parentage of the inventor. A stuck zipper can instantly take the passion out of an amorous encounter. I like my buttons, whether they be on my shirt or pants, the probability that I have a button failure or jam is almost nil. Zippers may be fast, but they certainly are neither cool nor hip.