By Ben Bush

FROM HIGH SCHOOL shop classes to construction sites, fashion critics wearing hard hats and steel-toed boots have long cast a disdainful eye on shorts and sandals. And sadly, San Francisco, in many ways an open-minded city, perpetuates that distaste. Wearing white after Labor Day seems as dashing as sporting an Armani suit when compared to wearing flip-flops in the foggy city. Not only do most San Franciscans choose not to wear shorts, but my experience has been that they patently disapprove of those who do: an aberration in the city's live-and-let-live attitude.

To experience the city's scorn firsthand, I put on my gold mesh shorts, manufactured from the same material as the liners of swimming trunks, and revealed my pale, hairy legs and knobby knees. I had carefully selected a pair of boxers that would look good through all the evenly spaced mesh holes in the fabric. My snaggletoothed toenails hung over the edge of my Baywatch-brand flip-flops, a toe-flossing pair decorated with an earth-tone, faux Indian motif. On my T-shirt in puffy-paint bas-relief was an image of a red deck chair on a strip of shoreline, with, beside it, an enormous nautilus shell that, disobeying all logical proportion, dwarfs the seagull flying above it. Could I be the flint to ignite the stored potential energy of charcoal gray power suits into the kinetic colors of summer-fun beachwear?

"You look like a real Californian. Where are you visiting from?" the man selling shoe shines in the Montgomery Street BART/Muni station asked as I climbed in one of his chairs and placed my flip-flopped feet on the footrest. His two comments cut to the heart of the contradiction: to wear attire that truly celebrates California is to brand oneself as an outsider. When I asked if there was a discount rate considering the reduced surface area of open-toed shoes, he sent me packing. "Stay warm out there," he advised.

Playing the tourist

I ordered a frappucino at the Steps of Rome. The clerk shielded his eyes from the glaring luminosity of my golden shorts and referred me to the selection of cold drinks.

"Do you know how to get to the curvy street?" I asked the bartender smoking in front of Vesuvio, a bar that opens at 6 a.m. and means it. "I have a very important business meeting there."

"You mean Lombard?"

"Uh, maybe," I conceded.

Anticipating a harsh rebuff, I instead received polite and thorough directions.

Lunch break in Pacific Heights

I met up with my friend Mei to go for a walk on her lunch break. "You look homeless," Mei said. I had stuffed my man-legs into some black, knitted leg warmers lent to me by my girlfriend. The importance of layers in our city's mercurial weather cannot be overstressed.

A maintenance van lingered an unusually long time at a Stop sign ahead. As we walked toward it, the driver and his passenger craned their necks to stare at us. "See," I said. "Yet again society casts its harsh judgment on those of us who choose to expose our lower extremities to the open-air of God's creation."

Sadly, Mei often has to break down even the simplest of truths for my tiny consciousness. "No, dude, they're looking at me."

"Hey, girl, you're looking good today," the driver yelled. My strictly platonic friend Mei is a foxy lady even when she's just shlumping around the house in her sweatpants. She also doesn't like being catcalled. And so, even though it's probably perpetuating all kinds of stupid gender dynamics, I put my arm around her shoulders in a protective/possessive gesture.

The driver laughed. "There's no way she's your girl!"

"I'm a lucky man," I replied.

Glancing at my shorts and woolen knees, he replied, "Well, you'd certainly have to be."

Shopping for shorts

During the course of the day, I encountered literally hundreds of people – but I could count on one hand the number of them wearing shorts. I found a comrade in Jeff, a Mohawked Starbucks employee who wears shorts every day. "It gets hot behind the counter," he said. "Why would I want to be uncomfortable for the sake of fashion?" Wise words, Jeff, wise words. When will the rest of the world wake up?

I was curious to see what Union Square's luxury shopping experience had to offer in the way of shorts and sandals. "Would you feel comfortable wearing this?" the clerk asked, lifting a $220 pair of tiny Prada shorts off the rack. His demeanor implied the working knowledge of fashion runways on several hemispheres. I asked him if he knew why San Franciscans didn't wear shorts. "They like to hide their bodies," he replied.

And so I say to you: San Franciscans, here me now! Your bodies are beautiful! Be not ashamed to flaunt your knees and toes!

The World Affairs Council presents Kim Dae-Jung

Like many of you, I have been gravely concerned about U.S. threats of military force against North Korea. Hoping for deeper understanding, I attended a lecture by former president of South Korea and Nobel Prize-winner Kim Dae-Jung (not to be confused with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, who is known for combing his hair upward and being nearly universally disliked by the international community). San Francisco's World Affairs Council regularly arranges these kinds of lectures, and they're usually free. And there is no better summer-fun activity than lectures from visiting world leaders.

Important people were shaking hands on all sides of me. I was far and away the most underdressed person on the 15th floor of the Merchants Exchange building. The lecture was filled to capacity, I didn't have a reservation, and I was dressed in my summer best, yet still I was allowed into the auditorium, which had ornate carpets and views of the sculpted pinnacles of neighboring office buildings. My, what an open and free democratic society we live in, that even its most poorly dressed members are enfranchised to hear lectures from visiting world leaders! Don't worry, I was plagued with doubt and guilt: was I embodying American contempt for international relations by arriving at such an event dressed like this?

"I believe that rays of sunshine are better than the icy winds of war in bringing change along the Korean peninsula," Kim said. There in my shorts, shivering in the air-conditioning, I couldn't have agreed with him more.

To avoid the line for the crowded elevators, a pack of fellow audience members and I decided to walk down 15 stories. Only then did I notice how my feet and knees were searing with pain.

Masochism

Lymph oozed from where the razor-sharp straps of my Baywatch sandals had cut into my feet. A halo of pain encircled my right patella. In an effort to stop the agony, I actually walked down Seventh Street barefoot until I encountered a cluster of pigeon feathers with some wandlike bones still attached and a gray-green pool of pigeon excrement.

I stopped in the Mr. S bondage supply store, which sells a variety of leather and synthetic polymer clothing for restraining your consensual lover. I asked the staff about the selection of leather shorts. Apparently, some kind of Palm Springs, leather shorts-wearing conspiracy had tapped out the market. Cirus, a sales clerk with close-cropped red hair and a matching goatee explained, "We don't sell a lot of shorts. I'm sure we'd sell a lot more if we were in Palm Springs."

"If we see people wearing shorts, we assume they're not from around here," a coworker chimed in.

When I commented that I recalled seeing guys in leather shorts at the Folsom Street Fair, Cirus said, "Yeah, those guys were probably visiting from Palm Springs."

There is a legacy of bad knees in my family. Was this the day I had become its heir? Well, at least if I become the old guy whose knees swell whenever a storm is a-brewing, I'd know when it would be warm enough to wear shorts and sandals. Which, as night arrived, it was rapidly becoming less so. My aching limbs made me realize the only way I could persevere through a hipster club crawl would be if my friends carried me around on a stretcher.

Heavy metal

I managed to hobble to 58 Tehama St., which has opened its hearth and home to rock shows for years. The crowd was wearing bruise-colored Dickies work pants and eagerly anticipating a night of heavy metal. "Why are you wearing those leg warmers, ya fucking hippie?" asked Dan Wedgewood, bassist for Burial Year, when I walked up. "Don't you know it's cold out? What is it, theme day at work?"

It's a good thing that in addition to being too uptight to wear shorts, San Franciscans also don't dance, else my toes would have been beaten to death in the mosh pit. After the show I shambled down into the BART station, holding my right leg stiff to reduce the pain. The people coming up the escalator looked at me not with fashion-centric judgment but with compassion and pity, and I felt ridiculous for thinking that anyone in this city of busy, fundamentally preoccupied people gave an iota of shit about me wearing shorts.

Like a scientist whose results refute his thesis, I have prostrated myself before the data. Sandals are not comfortable. And San Franciscans care about how you dress only long enough to give you looks that require a sophisticated eyeball-monitoring machine to record. I am icing and elevating my knee as I write this. Every time I remove my socks, there is a painful tug from where my wounds have healed into the fabric.