You’ve Really Done It This Time, Dryer Monster

Somehow, despite thousands of years of logistical evolution, we’ve still managed to create and actively maintain the mythology of the dryer monster. There’s no Job Eating monster if you get fired or Impregnating Monster if you knock up a girl, but lose a sock in the process of doing laundry and guess what: NOT YOUR FAULT. Common knowledge, asshole, the dryer monster ate it. How man has come to accept responsibility for global warming but still can’t own up to the fact that somewhere between the dryer and the laundry basket you lost a sock is beyond me. In fact, I’m going to write a novel. It’s going to be called “One of a Kind: Apologies of a Sock Loser” and it’s going to be about a man who takes on the immense burden of all the lost socks in the world and dies.

The sequel (title TBA) will be about this.

Yesterday I did a load of laundry and washed my pair of workout gloves.

Wait for it . . .

I SAID WORKOUT GLOVES.

Yes, stereotypically speaking there are certain, how shall we say, douchebag qualities specific to the man who wears workout gloves. And I resisted for a long time because I grew up before metrosexuality even existed and, along with the ability to grow a mustache if necessary and inspire confidence while driving in bad weather, having calluses on your hands was a sign of manliness. In college, before I realized that most girls were 60% easier than you thought they were, I would purposefully rub their fingers over my calluses, hoping to evoke images of me tilling soil and wiping sweat from my brow with my shirt, which I have just removed because the heat – it is too much. Since I never collected any empirical data, though, it’s impossible to say if this move ever proved successful, which it probably didn’t.

Then one day I saw my dad use hand moisturizer. Fucking rocked my world. My dad, who once cut off the tip of his thumb with a table saw and drove himself to the hospital and the tip grew back (nail and all) because my dad’s body intuitively knew that it needed that thumb tip to properly swing a hammer, was using hand moisturizer. It was exactly like when Jack found out about his father’s drinking problem on Lost but SO MUCH MORE INTENSE.

I never asked him about it, but everything I needed to learn from what I witnessed can be summed up thusly: Life’s too short to have rough hands.

So yeah, I wear workout gloves at the gym, and sometimes people look at me and I know they’re thinking awful, insidious things, but damnit they’re comfortable, and I feel like if I had to punch someone while wearing them my punch would be twice as effective, not to mention five times more dramatic.

But oh, the dryer monster. Like a serial rapist on Law and Order: SVU, it is escalating. Where once a sock amuse-bouche was enough, now it needs a workout glove main course, too. For the life of me I cannot explain it. Not why the dryer monster would want a workout glove, because for all I know they are delicious by the standards of fictitious monsters’ appetites, but how in the world I lost it. My dryer is in my apartment – the glove is disappearing from inside the apartment! Could it be that the dryer monster is real? That it’s not just a creation by man to shirk the mundane responsibilities of everyday life, like how you don’t have to wash a toothbrush because it “cleans itself”? Or could it be that the dryer monster is real, and it’s inside all of us?