I am a man obsessed.
Anyone that doesn't watch each season of Mad Men, at least twice in succession, and then document their experiences in writing or in some other quasi-expressive endeavor, is not living to my standards.
(Do you italicize a tv series?)
This show is the only thing that has ever made me want to read John Cheever. Even when Rhys is here, I am up late into the night, gorging myself on episodes like a man with a genuine problem.
From the episode last night, in which the news of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination was made known. Roger Sterling walks into Don Draper's office and says only this:
The man knew how to talk. I don't know why I thought that would save him. I thought it would solve the whole thing.
Well, if any regular readers here will recall, I had ordered some kitchen wares from the local hoodlums, ostensibly to finance some school trip down the coast to Monterey. The boxed booty finally came (see pic above); a pot holder (not shown), a silly hippo cutting board, and templates to cook eggs based entirely on mood. I wondered if the stuff would ever arrive. I thought the little gypsies had taken me. I couldn't even tell which one had peddled these expensive domestic fictions. The all look alike. They're ethnic, or something. The kids, I mean.
To speak of domestic fictions...
I have begun washing my own clothes again, also.
(I know, I am a pig of several sorts.)
But, it's true, and a very strange thing has struck me during the process. I will go a month or more without washing clothes. I own that many t-shirtsm and jeans, and well.... I was warned not to wash the jeans.
So.
As I am trying to rack the t-shirts straight out of the dryer while they are still warm I become quite impressed with my survival abilities. I have the timing on this thing down now. It really is all about the rhythm. That is, unless you've given up and just don't care any more. Then, your clothes just become a soft lumpen mess from which you draw and prepare each day's new outfit.
I will rush no less than twenty newly racked shirts into the closet and then almost as many gym shirts. The latter I will simply stack one on top of the other and then use them again in inverse order. The socks can wait until they find their lost partners among the ruins of Washington Hill.
Nothing says love like socks does.
It's when I get to my underwear count that the math on this monthly strategy starts to crumble. It makes no sense, at all. It just can not be possible. There appears to be an administrative error, or two, at least. I count the other articles, I carefully count the crusties again. I do the math... the very specific division between undies and days passed. I immediately suspect a thief. Though, who would steal my underwear...? That activity works best the other way around, I've found.
I think back carefully to the last time I washed clothes, and what my life was like then. I try to remember a time that I washed only underwear between that time and this time. I search my memory for such an odd washing session. The numbers just don't add up, or divide, or anything. There are no memories to backup up an illicit undies washing session.
Disgust is the only available response. I inspect all of them with a newfound scrutiny, searching for any errant indicators, wayward blemishes. I am hoping to find one pair that I can throw out, blaming everything on that weird two-week period in my life, only a few days previous.
Nope, they all seem reasonably clean, and I wear (mostly) men's white cotton boxer-briefs. This type of underwear is closely related to the eternal grade school tattle-tale. If you had ever acted inappropriately and perhaps deserving of a demerit, for even a single indiscreet second, then this underwear would announce that fact loudly and proudly to the whatever world would listen. Muffled on one side, present danger on the other.
Nothing there, I swear, which also makes very little sense. The only explanation is that I have soiled a pair of underwear so completely and over such an unexpectedly long period of time, then forgotten having done so, and there is somebody that sneaks into my apartment (hopefully a young woman) and steals them from me for who knows what foul personal pleasures. It is conceivable that, when finished with her own perversions, she is washing them and returning them back into the stack, to be used again by me. Maybe she sneaks off into the night with the next pair, for a month of private joys and longing. It is impossible to say with any certainty.
This month, I will be on better guard against such a thing.
You have my word.
.
