Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Split Laundry Personalities

Because of my own limited experiences and my exposure to fictional characters such as Two-Face and Jekly and Hyde, I always thought of split personality disorder as a largely fictional disease. Even then, I imagined that if were real, it would have dramatic symptoms. Alter egos were evil beings who love destruction, who revel in chaos and who fiddle while Rome burns.

I've begun to suspect that split personalities are not so rare, nor so dramatic; I even worry that I might have one. I realized this just this evening after returning from the laundromat. I placed my clean clothes on the floor and grabbed my towel off of the door hook only to find a used undershirt hiding there. "I have no idea how that got there" was the first thing I thought, but, deep down, I knew that I myself placed it there.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. In my experience as a (pretend) grown up who does his own laundry, it's a rare occassion that I return to my room not to find an extra sock or pair of boxers hiding in a dusty nook, waiting desperately to be found and reunited with their generation of dirty clothes.

And that bugs the crap out of me. Laundry is already a sysiphean task; it's as if Sysiphus realized reached the crest he had been aiming for only to find it was was actually only a plateau, and the hill continued! So I find it strange that my natural aversion to doing laundry hasn't trained me to clean every possible under(shirt/wear) and sock so that I can get every last day out of that laundry load.

With that in mind, what if I do have an alter-ego who loves destruction, who hates order and efficiency, and whose ultimate goal is to hasten the entropy of the universe? And what if the way that he manifests that is to hide my laundry from me? That would explain the socks tucked inside pillowcases, the shirts hidden in instruments and the underwear disguised in a stack of magazines. This would also explain why my split personality is so well hidden from everyone else, and even myself.  His mission is so discrete and precise that he can afford to snooze most of the time, only awakening at key moments. But then, in an instant, he can appear to tug open the doors under the sink and flick an undershirt in before he disappears without me noticing.

I tell you, it's a scary thing once you realize what your alter ego might be up to. I fear I may be trapped in a battle of wits with him till the end of my days.