Laundry as a Form of Self Discovery

Laundry sucks. In the two years I've been on house arrest, I've just now started to get the tiniest little purchase on Mt. Dirtyclothes and that's just towels. I can keep up with towels. Everything else is chance.

Being the knight-like, selfless, humble servant I am to my family, I often reserve my own clothing to be washed last which means, if I'm lucky, I'll get to it before Kehjouteck shows up. However, I manage to get a shirt or a pair of pants cleaned enough to not run naked through WalMart. Sometimes, I don't. recently, I found myself wearing a t-shirt that had been on me so long it was taking phone calls and ordering lunch. I had to meet someone, pick up something at an office, and I figured I ought not look like I'd been abducted and dragged through a hayfield. So I put on my vegas suit.

You know the suit. I'm sure you have one too. For a guy, it's a bad ass black suit with killer cufflinks, shoes like small italian lapdogs laquered to a fine black veneer; a white linen shirt with a thread count approaching infinite, and a tie that can only be compared with the "girl in the red dress" in The Matrix. Even my socks are cool. Fully Sinatra. The Vegas suit.

I drive to the appointment listening to, no kidding, Sinatra, and feeling pretty swank. I swagger into the office and the girl behind the desk smiles at me. She grins actgually, a full on ear to ear and I just assume she's digging the Vegas suit. So I stand there, hands in my pockets, swinging my tie, being cool. I'm Joey Bishop. I'm Dean Martin.

The girl is still grinning. She picks up her receiver and whispers something into it and I scan the room and decide whether I'll pick up the USAToday or gaze cooly out the window when the grinning receptionist buzzes a friend through, another woman, who breezes into the room, takes in the Vegas suit, and lays a smile on me that makes me hear music. For a married man, this is a good day.

Another office worker walks through from the opposite door and grins at me and shares a look with the receptionist and I start to get a feeling, a kind of gnawing question, the idea that maybe it ain't my suit they're digging. That maybe a middle aged portly married man in a 400 dollar suit is still not much different from Capt. Kangaroo in black. I snap back into reality. Nobody over 22 smiles at middle aged portly men no matter how much they work out unless they actually drop wads of money in their path like crumbs--and that's not even a smile. Its a precursor of rictus. Nobody over 22--unless their pants are unzipped.

I spin around and do the "I-think-I-forgot-something-in-my-pocket--no-no-the-other pocket--shit!" check which delivers a positive YES YOUR ZIPPER IS DOWN YOU REGARDLESS JACKASS report.

See, I recently started wearing suspenders. This is NOT proof that I am an ancient old dork but finally cool enough to take off my jacket and roll up my sleeves, which I do on the rare occasion, like a really distressingly hard game of boggle. I just figired it was time. I needed that 1940s detective sobriety in my appearance. It's part of growing up. Besides, my damn stomach kept rolling over my belt letting my pants slip down and I looked a little too bubbalistic. What I didn't think about is how we are creatures of habit. Whenever I buckled by belt, I zipped. It was like punctuation. My suspenders suspended that habit leaving me frozen in the middle of an office with my hatch open below decks.

If I had only kept the laundry up. I'd've been standing there in a belted pair of shorts with a Hawaiin shirt and my zipper welded tight.

However, I manned up. In full view I casually closed the barn doors and picked up that USAToday I'd been considering and went about my business, horrified by the idea that I'd worn this suit six times already since I got the suspenders and people smile at me all the time. How many fundraisers had I unwittingly been the main attraction? I'd given a very popular lecture recently in this very suit with these very suspenders. Very popular. Lots of applause.