First: if I haven't mentioned it to you, I'm currently in rehearsals for The Rude Mechanicals' latest staging of Much Ado About Nothing! It runs weekends from May 9-17 (with a min $5 pay-what-you-will preview night on May 7) at the Greenbelt Arts Center. Tickets available here!

So last night I came in from rehearsal with an inclination to play with tie knots, since I was casually pondering knots different characters might wear. (Our version of Much Ado is set in a law firm; many of the characters are lawyers or lawyer-adjacent and therefore wear ties.) It's a thing I feel like many productions and media in general overlook -- understandably so; most men really don't put much thought into the knots they tie (if they even know more than one or two knots), so I imagine that knowledge isn't a high priority for costumers -- but I always appreciate when media does take it into account. (Arrow remains the gold standard for this; I also recall the first Ant-Man being noteworthy for the quality if not the diversity of the knots depicted.)

Anyway. I'm pretty sure that my character, Pedro Prince (Don Pedro), wears a Balthus knot, probably with a red tie or possibly a gold one, with a darker blue striped tie as an outlier. (I may not yet *own* the tie I think he wears; I have comparatively few red ties -- it's not a color I favor -- and possibly none with the thickness/texture I think best complements the Balthus knot. That said, if it's being paired with a vest -- meaning I don't have to worry about it being the proper length -- I can possibly wear the tie such that it's wider higher up, in which case the greater width might compensate for the thickness. Things to consider, but I also don't mind excuses to own more ties. 😛 ) Other characters almost certainly need different knots, and some of those knots are not knots I tie often. So I wanted a fresh look at them, and I like tying knots, so I set about to do that. And for this particular undertaking, I dug out one of my Trump ties.

I own two Trump ties. One of them I don't particularly like at all, but the other -- a yellow tie with a repeating gray/silver diamond pattern -- is actually not a bad tie. As I was reminded last night, it is actually a pretty great tie, especially given what I paid for it. Most of the ties I own, including some of my favorites, have certain *predilections*: one might tie any knot with them (length depending), but they very clearly gravitate towards and look better with particular knots than others. But this Trump tie -- damn. I was putting it through the paces and *trying* to trip it up, and it looked excellent with every knot I threw at it. Granted I wasn't *exhaustive* about it (I didn't touch the tail-end knots), but I was pretty impressed. The pattern isn't my favorite (it's not the yellow and silver paisley tie you've seen me wearing; that one's probably in my top seven favorite ties I own), and I'm not eager to wear a Trump tie given the way this motherfucker is fucking up the country. But I don't have many ties that feel quite as versatile and look as good as that Trump tie did last night.

So all of the above is basically a roundabout way of getting to my continued UTTER BAFFLEMENT that Trump's own tie knots look so goddamned fucking horrible. This motherfucker had a whole line of apparently pretty good ties (well, given the other one, ymmv) that tie quite well, yet when he touches them and puts them around his own neck they look like absolute shit. There's probably a good metaphor somewhere in that -- not that conservatism and the Republican Party were perfect before, but they're intellectually incoherent garbage now that Trump's co-opted them -- but I'm really just stuck on the awfulness of the aesthetics. Just. What. The. Fuck.

Thank you for following me on that journey. 😆