Laundry May be Closer than it Appears

It's all about the socks.  Socks, or the lack thereof, is what gets in the way of my writing.  Scratch that.  Socks don't actually cause a problem with my writing - just a problem with me getting enough sleep after I've spent all my laundry time playing writer.

Tonight's laundry-ran-out-of-socks-wore-same-pair-two-days-in-a-row-now writing work involved selecting a font for my blog.  Fonts are very personal.  Here is a terrific piece from a font.  It is a McSweeney's monologue: I'm Comic Sans, Asshole.

By the way, it used to be all about the underwear.  But on several occasions when I couldn't find my clothes, I bought new underwear feeling certain that I was somehow managing to live on a mere 3 or 4 pairs.  Now I have perhaps three dozen pairs of underwear.  So now it is all about the socks.

The other day the guy that runs the laundromat said to me, "Where were you last week?"  I said, "I hadn't run out of socks yet."  And then I hiked up my pants legs and showed him my cold ankles.  "See."  It happens every time.  The first pile of clothes to come out of a dryer has to cough up a pair of toasty fluffy socks to be sacrificed to the freezing feet god.

I'm thinking of becoming a sock snob.  I'm thinking of taking my tax refund and buying gobs of pairs of fancy schmancy running socks.  Pink ones with stripes.  I'll be like that guy in The Great Gatsby who throws all his silky clothes around and wallows in them.  I'm going to wallow in pink socks.  At which point it is going to be all about the jeans.

Some day I'm going to own enough clothes so that I will never be interrupted from my writing by laundry again.  Or not.  Tennessee Williams considered part of surviving "the catastrophe of success" a doing of mundane tasks for oneself.  I have a clipboard.  I need to load it up with paper and take it to the laundromat with me.  The writer at large.  The writer in her native environment: on a plastic chair in front of a quarter fed jumbo-shakin'-disgorged-a-pink-sock-on-the-way-to-mars washing machine.

I picked Courier.  I think Courier is a no nonsense font.  A typewriter font.  It's a font that definitely does its own laundry.  It is also a font that stays up late writing the sports reporter's latest perfect turn of phrase about the game that ran to 15 innings, the game that forged on ferociously into the warm night because no one actually wanted their team to win because no one wanted the evening to come to an end.


photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryqueensland/6228828771/