Where clothes go to die

Most of us are all too familiar with the ancient mystery of the disappearing left foot sock during laundry. If you’ve never heard of this phenomena, it probably means that your mommy is still doing your laundry for you, and that only increases chances of her also picking out your clothes, your dirty magazines, she mashes your potatoes for dinner and kisses you nite nite before she tucks you in with your teddy and local tart every night. I’ve had my fair share of sock mysteries during my short life, and I’ve experienced the immense terror of having to wear my baby brother’s neon-purple Teletubbies socks to school after having had a wild wrestle match with 32 single socks in my drawer. At times my struggles have gone so far that I’ve actually considered painting or tattooing the socks directly onto my feet, once I even came up with a theory that my socks are gay and in dire need of some homo exorcism at my local church, but it would only be cheaper to buy new socks, and thus I was fooled into the docile stillness of stupidity and never ending socklessness.

Still, some days I just give up and wear unmatching socks, I mean, it’s not that big of a deal unless you’re walking around with one West Ham United supporter sock on one foot, and “I HATE FOOTBALL” on the other. Then missing socks will be the least of your worries.

Although it makes a thrilling topic, the issue of missing socks isn’t really my main target in this text. I’m cranking it up one level, yes, I know, how will you manage to keep calm in proximity to such intense excitement? Settle down children, I want to discuss the topic of missing CLOTHES. Tell me you’ve never experienced waking up after a long, steamy night dreaming of Benny Hill lifting you up on his white steed and doing unmentionable things to both you and the steed, throwing yourself in the shower and coming out only to discover that you don’t have a single decent piece of clothing to wear? I mean, sure, you’ve still got your leather vest and cap, but you weren’t really feeling up for an aching ass that particular day.

What you don’t know at that instant, is the evil pact forged the day before, when you thought you were doing good by putting your dirty clothes in the laundry basket. A pact between your favourite shirt and the washing machine. All you know is that you’re left naked, wobbly, and late for work. At first you’ll find yourself head first in the dirty laundry basket hissing your way through week-old undies and sweaty shirts with various crusts of delight, you could have reached China if not for the nice men in white clothes that come to get you and make it all better again. And so, straight-jacket it is, problem solved.

I personally enthusiastically believe the theory of clothes being living beings that are easily insulted and very grumpy. If you ever leave home without your raincoat, you know it’s gonna rain like hell all day, and who’s the one getting wet? Your clothes.

If you’re on a blind date, after twenty-two years of desperate celibacy that is threatening to clog up your lovetubes, and the guy looks like he’s thrown himself off a high story building into a meat grinder, only to become his German surgeons personal sex toy for 3 years, until he got released yesterday, and his personality matches his lovely exterior. Who’s the one getting up close and person with this freak when he, during the first five seconds of the cinema ads throws himself over you like a licking-mad rabid dog during mating season, and you reach for your acid pills from the really-bad-date-I’d-like-to-die-now-please-kit in your purse? Once again, it’s your clothes. And when you finally find some man worthy of genitalia-mixing, who doesn’t get to be part of the fun, but instead is thrown mercilessly onto the cold, lonely floor before you both do mortale backflips into the bed and fornicate till your DNA fizzes all over the place? YOUR CLOTHES, for God’s sake!

Only special clothes ever get to attend fancy parties, the expensive elite of your clothes, so it wouldn’t be outrageous to claim that us humans are practicing a form of clothes apartheid. Are we clothes racists? Are our best clothes the superior race that gets to live large and hang in the nice closets, and our everyday, grey clothes have to slave all day with you at work, school, the gym and terrible dates, only to be flocked together in small, dusty concentration-closets?

If all this is true, perhaps clothes aren’t that fond of staying alive for long periods of time, thus they need a place to die, free from shame and suffering. After all, clothes don’t last forever, unless you’re Ötzi the ice man, and that’s just not a good pose for anyone. Some clothes choose to die with style, whilst you are wearing them, when you’re bending over to pick up your bus pass you just dropped on the bus floor, with your bum towards the rest of the passengers, especially right in the panorama-view of that hunky chap right at the front, and the silence is shattered by the tearing sound of your trousers’ bottom parts going their separate ways, right before you throw yourself into the back of the bus, wanting to die, because you know that day, and that day only you were wearing your Kermit panties, and sew the pieces of your humiliated bum back together again with toilet paper or dental floss, at work. Other clothes are more discrete and just wait till they are in the laundry basket. That’s when they sneak away silently, like poachers in the night, until you’ve attained a new love handle or three, and you can’t fit into them anymore. That’s when they mystically reappear for a new life on your little sister’s well-shaped fourteen year old ass.

Perhaps one day we might be so lucky as to get a glimpse of this lost world, in an exciting expedition behind the washing machine, narrated by David Attenborough himself, where we’ll wander around aimlessly for days until we find that mythical place...Where clothes go to die.