On The True Crime Mystery We All Care About

Hello my dear reader and friend! Before we get started, I have a small request of you: tomorrow (if you’re reading this the day it comes out) is my birthday! So, if you wanted to hit me with a little birthday present, it would mean a lot to me if you shared this essay (or any one that you like better) on social media, sent it to a friend, or just left a comment if you don’t normally do that! Almost all of the growth of Will’s Dumb Brain comes from lovely people like you introducing my dumb thoughts to friends, family members, and co-workers. Thanks, as always, for reading. Now back to our regularly scheduled program!

If you really think about it, our lives are dangerously devoid of mystery. Imagine what it must have been like to exist in the 1500s in comparison. Everything was a mystery back then. Why did the river flood this year and not last year? Idk, God’s rage? What was that terrifying light that flashed across the sky last night? Incoming apocalypse? Why did a plague suddenly wipe out a third of your town? No idea but it’s definitely not all those diseased rats walking around like they own the place, it’s probably the English (if you’re Irish) or the Irish (if you’re English). There is one mystery that persists to this day, though. A mystery so mysterious that even now in this age of pervasive information, we have only a faint idea of what’s really going on…where the hell does that one sock go when you do the laundry?!

I’ve been doing laundry for the past, like, fifteen years. If you do anything for fifteen years, you expect to get at least kinda good at it, right? Well, after all these years, I still feel like I’m doing an absolute shit job because how can you consider it a job well done if you lose some of the clothes you’re supposed to be cleaning. The whole point of doing laundry is making sure you can wear your clothes again and if you lose them, well, so much for wearing that sock ever again!

It doesn’t seem to matter what I do, socks just go missing. I’ve done my laundry carefully and I’ve done it haphazardly. I’ve done my laundry at a laundromat and at my parents’ house. I’ve done the laundry when I was firing on all cylinders and I’ve done my laundry when I was hungover to the point of barely being alive. All of these situations has resulted in the mysterious disappearance of socks!

The thing that is really suspicious to me, though, is that I’ve never seen some cheeky report by NPR or the New York Times or any reputable journalistic establishment on this phenomenon (but to be fair, I haven’t looked that hard). This leads me to believe that there is a worldwide cabal of clothing manufacturers and laundry machine technologists who have created some kind of ingenious system to teleport all of our socks, one at a time, back to the headquarters where they can be resold to us over and over and over again! I have no evidence for my claims and I will accept arguments that anything else is happening.

On the other hand, I did hear that sometimes socks slip between the drum of your dryer and the frame and then when you take them apart like ten years later you find a treasure trove of lost socks…but that’s much less fun and interesting than a global conspiracy in which I am directly a victim and nothing is my fault. I guess we’ll never know the truth!

Please, leave me a comment if you have any solutions to this terrible problem!