Deep In

The Sock God
 
And the next day he reorganized his sock drawer. Really. He was that bored. He had done everything he could think of for months and months and months to keep his mind engaged. Among which, he’d begun half a dozen household improvement projects, half of which he’d have to hire a professional to come in and fix once social isolation was relaxed, and the other half just looked crappy. He’d resurrected his old watercolor hobby; the results looked crappy. He’d built an expensive Lego model of a vintage Mustang. It looked crappy (there were a bunch of pieces left over he couldn’t figure out what to do with). He engaged in gourmet cooking. It tasted crappy. He’d watched all his old DVD’s and BluRay’s. Twice. A few of them thrice. He cleaned the house top to bottom but that just made him grumpy. It was cold outside, now, and trying to snow today and the air was so dry all the moisture had been sucked out of his head from his sinuses up through his brain. He fantasized that cannibals would break into his home, crack open his skull and discover his brain had been dried into a raisin, and invent some new bran-flakes breakfast cereal into which it would be crumbled and eaten with cold milk. One day while surfing the Internet he stumbled upon a picture of a sock drawer into which a wooden grid like a honeycomb of XXXX’s had neatly created a well-organized space, and he thought to himself, “I want that!” He found some plastic ones online and when they were delivered he couldn’t wait to get to the categorization process. He’d laid awake the night before and calculated how to go about things. There were four XXXX grids and they were thin enough he reasoned he could get three of them into his drawer. He could have one for the thick winter socks and another for the thin summer socks and another that would be sort of a mix and he could trade out which was on top with each season. He could have a section for each category: a corner for the little half socks he wore with tennis shoes and next to it the calf-length socks he wore when he was actually doing something athletic for which the tennis shoes were designed. A section for the Bombas hiking socks. A section for the dress socks, black separated from grey separated from blue. A section for the socks he wore with jeans. A section for the wild pattern socks he wore with sandals partly as a joke on all the women who told him socks with sandals wasn’t sexy. He lay there in the night and he thought about individual pair of socks that didn’t fit neatly into a particular category; they would have their own corner. Why did he have those ones? Where did they come from? What was their purpose? How did they make sense of their existence? Did they intend to be different? Did they enjoy being different? How would they adapt to sitting alone in their own little pocket of the XXXX? Would they have preferred the world all mixed together without the organized segregation of the XXXX? Was he, himself, a sock? He was, after all, isolated in a little pocket. He couldn’t think of any other category of sock like him. Was he the kind of sock worn with sandals? Was his purpose not sexy? Did he even have a purpose? Was he on the bottom honeycomb of XXXX’s out of season? When was he in season? He began to see himself in his drawer of socks. He began to see himself shuffling himself along with all the other socks. He was both god and minion. The instigator of his own fate, and also the victim of it.
 
- CH