This has been the most stressful year of my life, and I don’t mind telling you. I still don’t understand what I did wrong.

Hello. I am cargo shorts. Which is to say, I’m a pair of normal shorts with a couple of extra pockets on the sides. That’s all. Pockets are nice, right? They’re the reason you don’t need to carry your money in your mouth when you walk down to the gas station for your nightly pre-Minecraft snack of Cool Ranch Doritos and Red Bull.

Hell, if you’re wearing me, you can just stuff all that crap in my extra side pockets on the walk back home and leave your hands free for useful things like sending text messages or applying a crude dressing to someone else’s sucking chest wound while you’re waiting on paramedics to arrive. But I digress.

You’d have to be a blind luddite or a Mike Huckabee supporter to not be aware of the vitriolic backlash against cargo shorts on the internet these past few months. I think it all started with Buzzfeed, who declared me “a deadly plague” (their words) that has “contaminated our neighborhoods,” (hyperbole much?).

In their rush to judgment, they never bothered listing one single specific grievance against me. Not one. So come right out and tell me, what’s so bad about me? That I’m an inexpensive, unpretentious, comfortable way to keep your legs cool on hot days with the added benefit of extra pocket space for seasonal items like sunscreen and sunglasses?

I seriously don’t understand why some people are so upset, especially considering all the other obnoxiously repulsive fashion trends out there today. In the age of 35-year-old adults wearing “Spongebob Squarepants” pajama pants and crocs to the airport and bro-tastic roofie-slingers buying truckloads of those insufferable Ed Hardy t-shirt abominations that look like a tattoo artist swallowed a pile of rhinestones and then threw up all over a game of “Dungeons and Dragons,” are shorts with pockets on the sides really that horrible?
I really don’t ask for much, just a run through the washer every so often and a fun tumble through the dryer afterwards, hopefully with one of those anti-static sheets that smell like the chemical equivalent of a crisp ocean breeze. But know this– I’m not going anywhere. I’m in millions of men’s closets nationwide and I will continue to do my job as I always have.