Why I Could Not Possibly Give An Answer

While I would like to have a definite answer about whether to forego the free tier of WordPress accounts, and try to set up shop on my own blogs with my own domain names and chance to customize every blessed thing in the world on the site — there’s few people second to me in debating whether tiny variations in typefaces look better — I’m also still in my third week of wondering whether it would in fact, and not just in theory, be a good idea to print out a sheet of what those inscrutable laundry-care label symbols mean and laminate it and put it by the washing machine. I mean, yes, the whole “clean off the little wooden table next to the washer and dryer so there’s some working space” was the best use of 40 minutes of my time in years. And yes, we have the laminator and spare plastic laminating sheets. But what if that turns out to be the wrong decision? So given that, you can understand why hosting my own site is a much harder thing to decide to do.

This Is A Particularly Baffling Warning

But who am I to dispute clear messages from the dream world? Anyway apparently sometime in the near future I’m going to be stuck driving from building to building across the west side of town looking frantically for the one place that has the laundry chute to the basement. Now, I know what you’re thinking, and of course I have checked. The laundry chute to the basement is still in the bathroom. Well, and the other half is in the basement. I guess there’s more parts between the two, but they’re not ordinarily accessible. I shouldn’t have to go to the west side of town for this. If I find myself there I should bring my dirty clothes back home and bring them upstairs so I can toss them down to the basement efficiently.

The Mid-Winter Fashion

To explain why I discovered only at the end of the day Monday that I was wearing a shirt inside-out I need to give some context. I don’t think I need to explain the wearing of shirts, as that’s been popular nearly my whole adult life, and Monday has been almost perfectly assimilated into American culture since its invention in 1964 as a way to ease the transition from Sunday to Tuesday.

Now, it’s wintertime. It hasn’t been as cruel a winter as last year, but last year’s was exceptionally cruel, frequently using the power of social media to ridicule individuals and harass them in what had been safe social areas. This winter has been much nicer, but it has still been getting cold, and the weather’s been getting bad. My love pointed out there isn’t any such thing as bad weather, only people badly dressed for the weather. I answered this by asking what about when the weather is minus two degrees Fahrenheit, and a heavy, wet snow is coming down so hard you’re on the verge of whiteouts, and it’s about ninety minutes after sunset. My love went “hrm” to this, and I added that you were stuck with a flat tire more than an hour away from home, on a frontage road outside the abandoned scrap metal recycling center, and your cell phone, which you never use and you charge all the time, is out of battery, as it always is, and none of these additions are properly the weather per se but they do help set the scene. My love walked away to ask our pet rabbit if he wanted a raisin, which he does.

Still, the right way to deal with weather like that is layering, which we start doing around November and let up on around March. The principle of layering is simple: you can stay somewhat less cold by, whenever you find an article of clothing, putting it on. Whenever you find an article of clothing. So just strolling around the house I’ll put on underwear, sure, and long underwear, and here’s a t-shirt by the bed, and a regular shirt that was on the dresser, and a dress shirt that was in the bedroom closet, and the soccer shirt from that one time I played soccer in tenth grade, and the novelty “2010” eyeglasses because eyeballs get cold too and what the heck New Year’s Eve might roll around again, and go downstairs and put on the blanket we put over the couch for guests because that’s kind of a dress shirt for furniture, and then put on the reclining chair, and that’s all before I’ve even got to the closet where we keep the jackets.

If it’s done right, by about mid-February you’re basically a gigantic elliptical bundle of flesh and cloth, and it’s not all that cold as you step outside, trip over your six pairs of shoes, and go tumbling down the road. People from warmer climates may believe that mid-Michigan in the upcoming weeks will be a field of spinning balls of population bouncing off one another until they roll into a snowy creek, all the layers keeping folks from freezing to death until the currents can sweep them into the Grand River. This is absurd. Given the plowed streets, people are much more likely to roll down to the strip mall and into the nearest Michael’s, where they bounce into the folks waiting in the line where, even though there’s four registers open and nobody has more than maybe three things to buy and everybody’s paying cash, the line never advances any. The disruption is appreciated since it gives customers the chance to give up on their plans to buy decorative boxes and plastic flowers and run off to the Petco next door and stare at heaps of sleeping ferrets instead.

You might think this makes laundry terrible, since there’s so many clothes to wash if you got them all taken off at once. And it’s true that the laundry loads are bigger than summer, but you don’t have to wash all the layers at once. The two great sources of dirtiness, in clothing, are the outside world, and only the outermost layer of clothing ever touches that, and the body, and only the innermost layer touches that. Everything else is just touching other clothes so you can let them slide a while or, if you’re wearing enough layers, let the accumulated fabric pressure crush any dirt that might somehow get through into little bitty lint diamonds, which are good for industrial lint needs.

Anyway, so this all gets back to how I discovered I wore a shirt inside-out on Monday: it was underneath that thing I wear that isn’t a hoodie, I guess, but that I call one because I don’t know what else to call it, and I didn’t discover this until I was getting ready for bed by taking off the outer eighteen layers. I feel kind of silly about it, but, I understand how this sort of thing happens and nobody else noticed.

Organized!

I bought some plastic storage containers today. Is there any feeling better than buying plastic storage containers? Yes, there is. Better is seeing somebody you can’t stand getting trapped underneath an Internet Dogpile as Twitter or Facebook or somebody notices they said something really stupid, and they go on just making it worse every time they try explaining that what they meant was something that was just like what they said only without the Twitter universe noticing them.

But buying plastic storage containers is right up there. It gives all the thrill of having your life in order even if you can’t figure out how to get them to fit in the car. I’m so hooked on this that the basement is turning into enormous stacks of empty plastic storage containers, looming high and making menacing faces at me when I do laundry.

So here’s my money-making idea: I’ll open a shop where you go in and wander through aisle after aisle of boxes of all kinds of shapes and colors and opacities and wonderfully complicated lids and snappy things and all that. You go around and buy all the ones you want, and then we keep them in the store so you don’t have to deal with getting them home or putting stuff into them or being afraid of the tidal flow of empty containers.

(Until then, the solution to getting the boxes home is to warm up the engine, melt the containers underneath the hood until they flatten out, and then when you get home reverse the process by backing your car into the driveway.)