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C'mon, boys n' girls...gather ye 'round the campfire here upon the shore of Crystal Lake whilst I spin for you a yarn so terrifying...so edifying...SO TRUE that in the telling your bladders will most certainly let go and wash us all into the lake, there to be hacked n' slashed most unnervingly by the reanimated corse of Mr. Jason Vorhees himself! This tale of horror and woe which I give to you is of a horribly recent vintage--indeed, it happened this very day--and shall prove to you the eldritch adage: "Never trust a woman's sock." Children, I give to you...THE TELLING TALE OF THE TELL-TALE SOCK (With Appologies to Edgar Allan Poe and Whoever Directed the Original Friday the 13th).
This tale of tenebrous dread begins late yesterday, Sunday evening in fact, when Your Unhumble Narrator, Uncle Pegritz, returned home from a bit of a trying weekend in Pittsburgh, the details of which matter little...but, suffice to say, when I returned to my home to find myself warmly greeted by my yowling, greypelted "daughter" Christyballs Greycat and the scent of the freshlybaked pineapple-coconut cookies my mother had left for me in my kitchen, I immediately felt the tensions of the weekend, though well-deserved, begin to ebb as the nervous lightning that had been haunting the crags of my brain faded into a subtle thunder. Though still a bit suffused with a residual melancholy and thus prone to Gothickal thoughts of my poor, benighted Lenore, I settled into the warm comfort of my home and began to unpack my belongings before taking up my Red Pen of Grammatical Doom with which to slash to bloody orts one last batch of ass-awful student papers. As I ascended to my loft, I noticed that the laundry basket I'd left upon the stairs was gone: an expected occurrence, since frequently if I leave my week's laundry within easy reach of my mother, who has taken it upon herself to be my unpaid maid, I will find my clothing washed and dried and ready to be ironed elsewhere. I used to find this annoying, because I've always been so accustomed to doing my laundry myself, but lately...hey, if the old lady wants to throw a load of my wash into the old suds-bucket, then I say more power to her. Being that she is prettymuch confined to this sepulchral house like some aged Prisoner of Chillon entrapped entirely by her own paranoia and depression, I figure that at least letting her do a load of laundry now and again is good for her in that it keeps her occupied doing something fairly low-impact the which she is also used to doing, to keep her mind busy and thus stave off the wicked black shadow of Alzheimer's which will, nonetheless, inevitably claim her.
Nonetheless, when I entered my narrow loft I discovered that she'd been busy in there as well. No, my meager collection of pr0n was neither discovered nor disturbed, nor did any particular signs of matriarchal snooping inveigle themselves to my notice--though she has been known, occasionally, to engaged in such clandestine investigation of my belongings in hope of, I suppose, turning up some dreadful truth about her son's supposed midnight proclivities (i.e., gay-sex hotline numbers, handcuffs encrusted with blood, mayhap an article of feminine sleepwear or even a shapely thighbone polished of meat). This time, she'd changed my sheets (which I'd changed just a week before, but that's beside the point) and pillowcases, and nothing more seemed even vaguely out of the ordinary...save for a single black sock lying in the middle of my bed like a fat, vermiform shadow in the flowerbed of my comforter. 'Twas but one sock, and the appearance of a solitary sock lying lost in the room is no great cause of alarum...being that at least half of my black socks have lost their mates to the horrific Phantom that haunts my dryer, devouring random socks, and now live a terrible widowed existence in the back of my sockdrawer. So, I figured the sock was a leftover perhaps fallen from my laundry basket, and needing to be reunited with its lost love at some later date. I flung it into my sockdrawer and forgot about it.
This morning, upon awakening and after spending a nice few moments conversing with the lovely Jessica and catching up on email and assorted other computerized nerdery, I went over to my mother's side of the house to spend some time with the ol' Baba Yaga herself and eat dinner (which she periodically fixes for me--another one of those just-let-her-do-it-so-she-has-something-to-do services). True, now! I shit thee not, but as I entered from the basement stairway I instantly heard a crabbed and suspicious voice call forth: "Who's that sock belong to?"
To which spake I, promptly, "Huh? What sock?" whilst I fetched a draft of Gatorade from the icebox.
"That black sock I left on your bed yesterday." She sat Hutt-like on her sofa, sweaty and annoying in he graceful sunlight, a look of smug disgust or curiosity or something deleterious pancaked onto her flabby face. "It's a woman's sock."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" quod I, completely taken by surprise by this bizarre conversation-starter. I had, of course, given the afforementioned sock no further thought since I drawered it the night before.
"I left a sock on your bed because I couldn't find the other one," she then said. "It's a woman's sock."
I, perplexed, "How the fuck would you know that?"
"It's smaller than anything you'd wear."
"Well, it obviously ain't mine then!" I laughed. "I may wear women's shoes*, but I've no need whatever to wear women's socks if they won't fit my long-ass feet!"
"Are you shacking up with the girl already?" she snidely prodded.
"HUH?!"
"You probably picked it up from her when you were sleeping together."
"HUH>?!" Now...I am accustomed to my mother's incredibly strange concatenations of logic whenever she is attempting to pin upon me some strange indiscretion or strangeness--usually committed with a willing member of the fair sex. In fact, I will gladly spin a thousand yarns--enough yarns to assemble a tapestry-book bigger than the AIDS Quilt--detailing her craziness, especilly that particular brand of snide, insinuating craziness that she always seems to apply to me when she knows I am no longer singular. I've never heard her assume so much merely from the discovery of an alien sock in my bedroom!
"How long you been shacking up with this girl, now?" she creeched...to which my only answer was a resounding, "MotherFUCK, woman, do NOT start this puerile bullshit with me already."
Sneering, "You living with her already?"
"Why, yes, I am!" I happily admitted, as though suddenly delighted to have such a grand secret outed! "In fact, Jessica and I have been cozy in a little garett of our very own since the delightful hour of our second date, at which point we clearly realized that the marriage canopy 'twas inevitably in our future, so why not waste the time with formalities and proceed directly to cohabitation before we'd discovered any irrelevant details about one another such as, oh...whether one of us is a smoker, or allergic to cats, or bees."
Needless to say, the Matriarch was not pleased at my flippancy, but one would think after provoking me to such flippancy--and beyond, often all the way to foul utterances and vicious instructions in self-copulation--she would've realized that 'twould have been a much calmer discussion to follow should she have simply asked me about the Sock in Question. Perhaps then, instead of growing instantly pissed off at the inane conclusions she is apparently reaching based on merely the discover of a sock not mine within my laundry, I would've faced the questioning with a concommitant air of perplexity and perhaps she and I together could've figured out who it belonged to. Instead, the most I could do was laugh sarcastically and suggest it be hers.
"I don't wear no goddamned black socks like those black-eyed devils you hang around with!" she creeched.
"OK, this is no longer fun," said I, "this is getting annoying. I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. That sock had to be mine, you dipshit, because I don't know from whom else it could've originated."
"I--"
"No, woman, just shut the fuck up," I groaned. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about and I'm not about to entertain this random frippery anymore. Let's just eat and drop the whole fucking sock spiel."
Surprisingly enough, I had to endure very little further jabs concerning the Tell-Tale Sock, which, apparently, in some aetheric fashion unreachable to my mind but fully explicated in great and fascinating detail to the motherly brain, had informed my mother that not only was I once more "seriously" involved with some Gothickal hussy of ill repute but that I was spending every weekend engaged in the darkest of erotic experimentations in her lace-canopied bed, wherein we gave voice to our DeSadean lusts amid billowing satin streaked with blood, sweat, and the liquors of love, and mounds of black socks tossed like shreds of some Gothick lettuce in a carnal salad by our lust-tossed bodies in their rapacious passion. The dinner went well, and my mother said nothing further about the Sock. I ate well, thanked her for the provender, and reported back to my side of the house....
As I arrived once more within my own comfortable quarters, I was immediately assailed by a certain fancy: I hadn't actually paid any attention to the mysterious sock the night before when I so casually discarded it to oblivion in the sockdrawer. Maybe, I pondered, it was one of Jessica's, somehow assimilated by mistake into my own belongings, much as, indeed, so much of her existence has been assimilated into my own--a strange metaphor-in-haberdashery of our entertwining affections. Well...if it was one of her socks, I'd certainly wish to return it to her. So, up the stairs I went. I opened the sockdrawer and there it was, the very item, lying sprawled atop a lumpy warren of its brethren like conies in a hutch. I picked it up and held it close to my eyes, perchance assailed momentarily by a strange dread of discovering a sock alien to both Jessica and myself--a woolen relic of some strange, Fortean transgression of time and space, or mayhap the lost sock of some spiritual traveller now wandering the ectoplasmic currents with one cold foot. I looked closer....
It was definitely smaller than one of my normal socks. And threadbare: the toes holed, the heel scraped raw....An old, sad tube of cloth who'd seen far too much service upon the craggy lever of my foot. I thought it, at first, an ankle-sock--one of those pygmy variants of sock popular with the ladies and some gentlemen yet anathema to myself, who prefers socks to keep his ankles warm rather than exposed--but, upon closer inspection, I realized that its truncated appearance was but an illusion formed by the fact that all the elastic had given away in its aged neck, leaving the top of the sock to purl in on itself. The sock was clearly mine, after all. Just beaten heavily by wear...left alone by the vicissitudes of washing and drying...a sad leftover whose last achievement in life had been, rather than keeping my foot warm and dry, stirring up my mother's kneejerk paranoia to such great heights that she imagined a great tale of Gothickal mystery and sublime terror from its tattered remains.
All in all, a decent end for a sock who'd clearly serviced my feet well for many a day. I gave it an appropriate burial in the trash can and laughed my way forth to work, once again astonished at the silly lengths my mother will go to imagine for me a life ten-thousand times as dashing and impressive as the one I actually lead. Hence the reason I never tell her anything about my real life: I fear the fundamental mundanity of it, though yet a mundanity greatly different than that which afflicts the lives of the majority of humanity, will be too much for her to bear. Better she invent for me a risque life of derring-do and sexual adventure; that way, I can enjoy it without having to undergo the stress and strain of actually doing it!
Stay tuned, folks! More Storytime with Uncle Pegritz is on its way!
This tale of tenebrous dread begins late yesterday, Sunday evening in fact, when Your Unhumble Narrator, Uncle Pegritz, returned home from a bit of a trying weekend in Pittsburgh, the details of which matter little...but, suffice to say, when I returned to my home to find myself warmly greeted by my yowling, greypelted "daughter" Christyballs Greycat and the scent of the freshlybaked pineapple-coconut cookies my mother had left for me in my kitchen, I immediately felt the tensions of the weekend, though well-deserved, begin to ebb as the nervous lightning that had been haunting the crags of my brain faded into a subtle thunder. Though still a bit suffused with a residual melancholy and thus prone to Gothickal thoughts of my poor, benighted Lenore, I settled into the warm comfort of my home and began to unpack my belongings before taking up my Red Pen of Grammatical Doom with which to slash to bloody orts one last batch of ass-awful student papers. As I ascended to my loft, I noticed that the laundry basket I'd left upon the stairs was gone: an expected occurrence, since frequently if I leave my week's laundry within easy reach of my mother, who has taken it upon herself to be my unpaid maid, I will find my clothing washed and dried and ready to be ironed elsewhere. I used to find this annoying, because I've always been so accustomed to doing my laundry myself, but lately...hey, if the old lady wants to throw a load of my wash into the old suds-bucket, then I say more power to her. Being that she is prettymuch confined to this sepulchral house like some aged Prisoner of Chillon entrapped entirely by her own paranoia and depression, I figure that at least letting her do a load of laundry now and again is good for her in that it keeps her occupied doing something fairly low-impact the which she is also used to doing, to keep her mind busy and thus stave off the wicked black shadow of Alzheimer's which will, nonetheless, inevitably claim her.
Nonetheless, when I entered my narrow loft I discovered that she'd been busy in there as well. No, my meager collection of pr0n was neither discovered nor disturbed, nor did any particular signs of matriarchal snooping inveigle themselves to my notice--though she has been known, occasionally, to engaged in such clandestine investigation of my belongings in hope of, I suppose, turning up some dreadful truth about her son's supposed midnight proclivities (i.e., gay-sex hotline numbers, handcuffs encrusted with blood, mayhap an article of feminine sleepwear or even a shapely thighbone polished of meat). This time, she'd changed my sheets (which I'd changed just a week before, but that's beside the point) and pillowcases, and nothing more seemed even vaguely out of the ordinary...save for a single black sock lying in the middle of my bed like a fat, vermiform shadow in the flowerbed of my comforter. 'Twas but one sock, and the appearance of a solitary sock lying lost in the room is no great cause of alarum...being that at least half of my black socks have lost their mates to the horrific Phantom that haunts my dryer, devouring random socks, and now live a terrible widowed existence in the back of my sockdrawer. So, I figured the sock was a leftover perhaps fallen from my laundry basket, and needing to be reunited with its lost love at some later date. I flung it into my sockdrawer and forgot about it.
This morning, upon awakening and after spending a nice few moments conversing with the lovely Jessica and catching up on email and assorted other computerized nerdery, I went over to my mother's side of the house to spend some time with the ol' Baba Yaga herself and eat dinner (which she periodically fixes for me--another one of those just-let-her-do-it-so-she-has-something-to-do services). True, now! I shit thee not, but as I entered from the basement stairway I instantly heard a crabbed and suspicious voice call forth: "Who's that sock belong to?"
To which spake I, promptly, "Huh? What sock?" whilst I fetched a draft of Gatorade from the icebox.
"That black sock I left on your bed yesterday." She sat Hutt-like on her sofa, sweaty and annoying in he graceful sunlight, a look of smug disgust or curiosity or something deleterious pancaked onto her flabby face. "It's a woman's sock."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" quod I, completely taken by surprise by this bizarre conversation-starter. I had, of course, given the afforementioned sock no further thought since I drawered it the night before.
"I left a sock on your bed because I couldn't find the other one," she then said. "It's a woman's sock."
I, perplexed, "How the fuck would you know that?"
"It's smaller than anything you'd wear."
"Well, it obviously ain't mine then!" I laughed. "I may wear women's shoes*, but I've no need whatever to wear women's socks if they won't fit my long-ass feet!"
"Are you shacking up with the girl already?" she snidely prodded.
"HUH?!"
"You probably picked it up from her when you were sleeping together."
"HUH>?!" Now...I am accustomed to my mother's incredibly strange concatenations of logic whenever she is attempting to pin upon me some strange indiscretion or strangeness--usually committed with a willing member of the fair sex. In fact, I will gladly spin a thousand yarns--enough yarns to assemble a tapestry-book bigger than the AIDS Quilt--detailing her craziness, especilly that particular brand of snide, insinuating craziness that she always seems to apply to me when she knows I am no longer singular. I've never heard her assume so much merely from the discovery of an alien sock in my bedroom!
"How long you been shacking up with this girl, now?" she creeched...to which my only answer was a resounding, "MotherFUCK, woman, do NOT start this puerile bullshit with me already."
Sneering, "You living with her already?"
"Why, yes, I am!" I happily admitted, as though suddenly delighted to have such a grand secret outed! "In fact, Jessica and I have been cozy in a little garett of our very own since the delightful hour of our second date, at which point we clearly realized that the marriage canopy 'twas inevitably in our future, so why not waste the time with formalities and proceed directly to cohabitation before we'd discovered any irrelevant details about one another such as, oh...whether one of us is a smoker, or allergic to cats, or bees."
Needless to say, the Matriarch was not pleased at my flippancy, but one would think after provoking me to such flippancy--and beyond, often all the way to foul utterances and vicious instructions in self-copulation--she would've realized that 'twould have been a much calmer discussion to follow should she have simply asked me about the Sock in Question. Perhaps then, instead of growing instantly pissed off at the inane conclusions she is apparently reaching based on merely the discover of a sock not mine within my laundry, I would've faced the questioning with a concommitant air of perplexity and perhaps she and I together could've figured out who it belonged to. Instead, the most I could do was laugh sarcastically and suggest it be hers.
"I don't wear no goddamned black socks like those black-eyed devils you hang around with!" she creeched.
"OK, this is no longer fun," said I, "this is getting annoying. I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. That sock had to be mine, you dipshit, because I don't know from whom else it could've originated."
"I--"
"No, woman, just shut the fuck up," I groaned. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about and I'm not about to entertain this random frippery anymore. Let's just eat and drop the whole fucking sock spiel."
Surprisingly enough, I had to endure very little further jabs concerning the Tell-Tale Sock, which, apparently, in some aetheric fashion unreachable to my mind but fully explicated in great and fascinating detail to the motherly brain, had informed my mother that not only was I once more "seriously" involved with some Gothickal hussy of ill repute but that I was spending every weekend engaged in the darkest of erotic experimentations in her lace-canopied bed, wherein we gave voice to our DeSadean lusts amid billowing satin streaked with blood, sweat, and the liquors of love, and mounds of black socks tossed like shreds of some Gothick lettuce in a carnal salad by our lust-tossed bodies in their rapacious passion. The dinner went well, and my mother said nothing further about the Sock. I ate well, thanked her for the provender, and reported back to my side of the house....
As I arrived once more within my own comfortable quarters, I was immediately assailed by a certain fancy: I hadn't actually paid any attention to the mysterious sock the night before when I so casually discarded it to oblivion in the sockdrawer. Maybe, I pondered, it was one of Jessica's, somehow assimilated by mistake into my own belongings, much as, indeed, so much of her existence has been assimilated into my own--a strange metaphor-in-haberdashery of our entertwining affections. Well...if it was one of her socks, I'd certainly wish to return it to her. So, up the stairs I went. I opened the sockdrawer and there it was, the very item, lying sprawled atop a lumpy warren of its brethren like conies in a hutch. I picked it up and held it close to my eyes, perchance assailed momentarily by a strange dread of discovering a sock alien to both Jessica and myself--a woolen relic of some strange, Fortean transgression of time and space, or mayhap the lost sock of some spiritual traveller now wandering the ectoplasmic currents with one cold foot. I looked closer....
It was definitely smaller than one of my normal socks. And threadbare: the toes holed, the heel scraped raw....An old, sad tube of cloth who'd seen far too much service upon the craggy lever of my foot. I thought it, at first, an ankle-sock--one of those pygmy variants of sock popular with the ladies and some gentlemen yet anathema to myself, who prefers socks to keep his ankles warm rather than exposed--but, upon closer inspection, I realized that its truncated appearance was but an illusion formed by the fact that all the elastic had given away in its aged neck, leaving the top of the sock to purl in on itself. The sock was clearly mine, after all. Just beaten heavily by wear...left alone by the vicissitudes of washing and drying...a sad leftover whose last achievement in life had been, rather than keeping my foot warm and dry, stirring up my mother's kneejerk paranoia to such great heights that she imagined a great tale of Gothickal mystery and sublime terror from its tattered remains.
All in all, a decent end for a sock who'd clearly serviced my feet well for many a day. I gave it an appropriate burial in the trash can and laughed my way forth to work, once again astonished at the silly lengths my mother will go to imagine for me a life ten-thousand times as dashing and impressive as the one I actually lead. Hence the reason I never tell her anything about my real life: I fear the fundamental mundanity of it, though yet a mundanity greatly different than that which afflicts the lives of the majority of humanity, will be too much for her to bear. Better she invent for me a risque life of derring-do and sexual adventure; that way, I can enjoy it without having to undergo the stress and strain of actually doing it!
Stay tuned, folks! More Storytime with Uncle Pegritz is on its way!
