Well! Isn’t this an exciting day! Not only did the Rangers and Yankees win last night, not only does the New Yankee Stadium open today, not only are freakin’ pirates (of the non-baseball variety) making a comeback, but I have finally completed my long-anticipated sock unification and clothing culling projects!
Since most of you won’t have been to my house, I will let you in on one of its most amazing features: the upstairs closet where I keep my clothing contains a localized Light Devouring Black Hole that cannot be illuminated by any earthly means. (No. If you’re wondering, the real estate listing did not read 4br., 2bth., LDBH, close to shopping.)
Since seeing one’s clothing is an indispensable step in the process of getting dressed, I have tried various means of penetrating the gloom in my closet: I’ve employed camp lanterns, battery-powered stick-on light bulbs, battery-powered screw-in lighting strips, common flashlights, fluorescent flashlights, penlights and miner-style headlamps. None of them even scratched the surface of the unearthly darkness. In order to see anything in there before the light is sucked into the Black Hole’s unquenchable maw, I have to wear a strap on headlamp and then augment that with a hand held flashlight. And even then I can only dimly make out about three-square inches of fabric before 98% of my candlepower is slurped up by the black hole.
My Light Devouring Black Hole is, admittedly, a small one, and I suppose if I wanted to dedicate the entire hallway to beating back the blackness, I could hook up one of those freestanding lighting rigs they use to work on highways at night, but since I haven’t quite wanted to go that far, I’ve been using a really stupid workaround—keeping my clothing in my office.
I didn’t initially intend to keep everything in my office. But my office is right across the hallway from the Light Devouring Black Hole in my closet, so what I used to do was reach into the swirling void and wrest forth items I thought I might want to wear. I’d then bring them into the office to look at what I’d fished out and see if it appealed to me. Of course, donning a full portable illumination rig as only the first step in getting dressed got old pretty fast, so eventually I gave up and just kept my clothing in my office.
At first, it was just the A Team items; my fave jeans, a few go-to T shirts, a pair of shorts… But as occasions called for increased wardrobe flexibility, more and more garments migrated away from the Black Hole and took up permanent residence in the office. These stacks, and piles and lumps of clothing eventually took on a character of their own: That of a lurking, admonishing testament to everything I hate about myself.
I used to walk into the office, look at the piles of crap, and think, “Why the hell don’t you do something about that? That’s atrocious.”
And then I wouldn’t.
People use to come into the office and say, “Wow! You hired an artist to create a life-size representation of your personal failings and install it right where you work! It’s amazingly accurate, but… why?”
I didn't know.
By far the peskiest elements of these Shame Mounds were socks. It’s common comedy fodder to observe that socks have a way of going missing and leaving their owners with incomplete sets, but I am somehow immune to this phenomenon. To the contrary, I believe that I still have every sock I’ve ever owned and that they’re all floating around in the blackness of my closet howling and wailing and searching for their mates. Going into the Black Hole looking for socks was a project that took at least 20 minutes. I'd reach in there, pull out a GoBots sock from 1986, and think, "Hey! I remember this guy!" But finding his fellow was a near impossibility.
Even when I “solved” the sock illumination problem by bunging all my socks into a cardboard box and keeping that in the office, the socks still haunted me. It took almost as much time to find a matching pair as it had in the Black Hole, plus, now my sock collection was always there, in my face, mocking me.
Well, friends, today I'm proud to say that period of my life has come to an end. Today, not only did I place into storage well-nigh half my clothing, but I also threw out every non-sport specific sock I owned and replaced them with three models: Puma ankle socks in gray and black, and a dozen black gold toes. Until further notice, I will only be wearing these three models of sock and I will not deviate from this narrow spectrum. If I am to become known as That Guy Who Only Wears Three Kinds of Socks, so be it, I have dwelt overlong in a lightless world, and I’m not going back.
Uh, no. I didn't finish my taxes. Why?
2 comments:
u r brilliant.
When your father's mother, your grandmother, sent her son, your father, off to camp, one of the counselors said "your son is easy to take care of, all of his sox are the same." It was one of those moments were something said in front of a 7 year old stuck for the rest of his life (so far). It is also why when your father bought sox for you and your brother they were always the same brand and style.
Yours, Joe Shlabotnik [guess the real commentor and identify Joe Shlabotnik (hint think of major league baseball and win $100.00, not Cliff Mapes)]
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