There has been some confusion at my house regarding these things people call closets. Rumor has it that these little windowless rooms are for storing things like clean clothes. We don’t subscribe to that voodoo hedonistic nonsense. At our house, we openly display all of our clothing on the couch. A couch is a place other people think is for sitting and watching TV—again, a ridiculous idea about how things work inside a home. Those same sorts of people probably think garages are for parking cars. Foolishness! Everybody knows garages were made for drum sets and storing Christmas decorations and unused dusty slot car tracks.
Regardless of other people’s household beliefs, at our house we keep all of our unfolded clean laundry piled in a huge mess on the couch. We aren’t a dirty family; the laundry is clean, it just isn’t folded or put away—ever. We do a great job of keeping up with the laundry. You won’t find any dirty clothes at our house. Coincidentally, you won’t find a couch to sit in either. But you will find a piece of furniture with 6 feet—yes, that is not an exaggeration—6 feet of laundry piled on top of it. If OSHA came over and saw how tall the laundry was stacked on our couch, they would require we wear hardhats in the living room. The clothes pile has gotten so large and unruly we nicknamed the mess “the Laundry Monster.”
Every morning before I can get dressed to go to work, I have to do battle with the Laundry Monster. The monster isn’t something you can brazenly face head on, unless you want to be instantly crushed to death. You have to sneak up on the beast and try to sift through its guts to try to find a matching sock. One wrong move and you’ll end up buried under a pile of beach towels and brassieres. It’s sort of like an enormous game of clothing Jenga.
The pile of laundry defies the laws of physics; however, it is very much in line with Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. Or, in the case of the Laundry Monster, if you’re looking for a specific sock, it is guaranteed to be at the bottom of 6 feet of your kids’ socks, which look exactly like your own until you try them on and find out they are two inches too short. Even if you use every muscle in your body to try to stretch these children’s socks to make them fit, they will always be just a bit too short to get you out the door in time for work. Everybody at my job knows the problems I have at home, so when I show up late, wearing two different-colored socks and one of my son’s T-shirts (complete with a screen print of Chewbacca on it) someone in my office will ask, “You lose a fight with the Laundry Monster today?”
“Does the Star Wars T-shirt make it that obvious? What you can’t see is that I’m also rocking my wife’s silk panties. Just don’t tell her. She may never look at me the same again.”
My wife and kids’ clothing always seems to be on the outer skin layer of the Laundry Monster. As my kids have gotten older, they have learned how to do their own laundry. My wife, whom I love, obviously does her own laundry. Me? I just wish for the best and hope that as my wife, son, and daughter each do their own laundry, some of my clothes will end up washed by chance. Lately, though, I have found myself battling the Laundry Monster longer and longer in an attempt to find some clean boxers. When I’m battling the Laundry Monster for underwear, I’m fighting naked, which isn’t pleasant for anyone in the family—or the neighbors, for that matter, since our couch faces the front window. It is a full moon every morning on my street.
After a recent rough battle with the Laundry Monster, I finally lost my cool and decided someone must kill it. I decided that the only way to get rid of the beast for good was to decapitate it. Armed with an entire afternoon with nothing to do, I cut off the beast’s head and began to fold and put away the laundry. I only put away the laundry we would wear. Most of what I found out as I sliced and diced my way through the guts of the beast was that deep in the bowels of the monster were clothes that didn’t fit anyone anymore. In the core of the beast, we probably had a hundred pairs of pink infant socks for a baby girl. Our daughter is 12 now. Instead of wearing baby socks and saying “gaga,” she wears skinny jeans and rocks out to Lady Gaga. I bagged the unusable carcass of the monster and took his corpse to Goodwill (hey, I gotta get that tax write off receipt before the end of the year).
The only problem with all of the folded laundry was where to put it. It turns out we own more clothes than we have room to store—hence the early birth of the Laundry Monster. Nobody’s bedrooms had space for the clean and folded laundry, so instead of one big Jabba the Hut laundry monster in one room, we ended up with four smaller Gremlin laundry monsters all around the house. Were we really better off? Since I don’t have to go into the living room naked to find underwear anymore, my kids say, “Oh, yes!”
Ironically, the curtains to the living room window couldn’t be closed to hide Rob’s rump due to their location at the bottom of the Laundry Monster.
This article appears in Dec 22-29, 2011.
