I cannot even begin to articulate how badly I hate socks. All socks, not just those socks that we men wear with our Sunday shoes. You know which shoes I'm talking about.... the ones without a tread pattern on the bottom. The socks that are too small to be pulled over your heel without Herculean strength. The same one that when worn to a funeral that is lengthy and includes a lot of sitting in the car traveling to and from all the different venues, become wet with sweat and just hold it in there right next to your foot. The ones that when you do finally get them over your heel, when you get home, get tossed into the dirty clothes basket only to become some type of stiff sculpture formed into the shape of whatever piece of clothing they were crammed up against. No..... not just those socks.... all socks.

To start with you pull out a clean pair at 5:50am and start slipping them on your sleeping feet. And no I don't shower in the mornings. I'm clean in the mornings. I'm dirty at night, so that is when I shower... OK? Plus when I have tried to shower in the morning I have noticed that my pores are open bigger than usual. They just let that water right on in and it cause me to have some drowning fear which can then cause a panic attack and then at best I feel soggy all day, like a sponge that someone forgot to squeeze out.

And I always take a shower, bathtubs scare me. In the early eighties I decided to run a hot bath and soak a bit while listening to The Beatles White Album, except it was a cassette home recording, not a real album, although I had the real album at the time but that would have necessitated that I get out of the tub to flip it at the half way points and to change records. So I get in the tub of hot water turn, off the light, and lean back and fit those earphones on my head. And it was awesome.

(I was going to post a picture of The Beatles White Album but decided that it would only look like this:



                 The Beatles


and I didn't see any reason to waste the bandwidth.)

About an hour and a half later (however long that double album is, I have no idea), I woke up to total silence in a dark... pitch dark room surrounded by something very hard and cold. For about a minute I really freaked out, totally. I thought I had been buried alive. I forgot all about the bathtub, the earphones and the switched off lights. Then my flailing arms got caught up in the headphone cord and the headphones came flying off and hit me in the exposed groin area.... which made me scream...which echoed really weirdly because I was sitting in an empty tub.

I then felt my way out of the tub, realizing in the process that it was in fact a tub, or at least it wasn't a grave unless it was a really tall vault. I found the light switch and flipped it on. The light brought with it a feeling of calm as I was able to acclimate myself to my surroundings and I began to remember how this had all started. I felt much better and was even beginning to chuckle about the whole situation. Right up until I turned back around and saw myself in the mirror. At this same instant a new thought elbowed its way to the front of my mind. "Why was I in a tub with no water?"

There had been water to begin with but when I woke up it was empty except for me and the headphones. Then the visual of me reflected in the mirror grabbed that thought and threw it to the floor of my mind and stomped on it's throat. My entire body was ten one hundred times more pruned than my hands had ever been in my life, and I washed pots and pans at KFC for a sixteen hour shift on Mother's Day once. I looked at my shriveled body and I looked at the empty tub, body, tub, body, tub. I had soaked up every drop of water in the tub.

No way... can't happen.... I checked the stopper in the tub, tight seal. Not possible... so I ran the tub full of water again, leaned up against the sink and waited.... no loss of water. I put the toilet lid down and sat down and waited some more, still no change in level. Finally after about an hour of waiting I gave up and let the water out of the tub. The wait had given my skin a chance to un-shrivel a bit and I was now only sightly terrifying to look at....

Where did the water go? Did I actually soak it up? Not possible, I know... but where did it go? Since then I don't get close to the tub unless it is a hot tub or jacuzzi where there are others to help watch for any sponging on my part. I can't take that chance again.

(I was going to stop right here because I was getting tired and I had forgotten why I was writing about bathtubs and headphones and then realized I wasn't. I was writing about socks. Some days the ADD is much more evident than others so... on with the transition back to socks...)

Bodies are not supposed to soak up water, at least I don't think they are.... socks on the other hand should soak up moisture which in turn makes them stiff and take on the outline of the buttons on your shirt and the band of your underwear. I have seen a lot of sculptures that I thought stunk but Stiff Sweaty Sock Sculptures really do stink so there wouldn't be much of a crowd at the gallery when I had a showing. Although I could have my showing at www.stiffsweatysocksculptures.com it would be a shoe-in to win a Webby, and then I would be forced to get all dressed up and put on socks.

Which reminds me of why I hate socks so much. When you put the sock on invariably in one or both of the socks somewhere around the ball of your foot of the arch there will be a sock bugger, you know that little bit of sock string that wads up and stays in the sock through two wash cycles and a forty-five minute tumble in the dryer.

Tonight I folded 26 pair of socks. They are all white. They are all different lengths and styles. The largest number of matching socks is 8, four pair that actually all match each other. There are three groups of three pair that match, three groups of two matching pair, two individual pair and five pair of diabetic socks that don't match anything. It took me about two hours to get them all paired off and folded and I was using a spreadsheet.

I hate those darn socks... they start my day off and end it on the wrong foot.