Enough Seventy depressing stuff.

Let’s look at the stocking situation. Everybody gives socks to the “senior citizen”. It is a little like discounts at restaurants. No one thinks seriously about discounts (except for the receiver of course). They are just sort of automatic, give because it is the thing to do. It is the same with socks. People give socks to seniors to avoid thinking about gift selection. For everybody who knows a seventy year old marathoner who would like expensive running shoes, there are a thousand people who know seventy year olds with feet, who may only use them for balancing the extended edge of the recliner. These “elders” one thinks, will certainly use socks. Socks for adults come mostly in “one size fits almost all”, so one doesn’t have to think about size. The giver can give on the cheap (Walmart has some socks three pairs for $2.98), or can feel extravagant and buy at Tuesday Mornings for about five bucks or really go for it at a male boutique for $25.00.

This is one reason that old men usually have sock drawers that are jammed full of socks.
A geezer might only have one or two sets of underwear, and very limited shirts and pants, but he will probably have a drawer jammed full of socks.

The gift sock phenomenon is not the only reason why the sock drawer is over-stuffed.
What people don’t consider is the secret life of socks. Everyone is familiar with dryer deduction: the process through which a clothes dryer automatically keeps one sock out of every five pairs that go in the dryer. What most people don’t know about is stocking multiplication. When the sock owner becomes seventy (plus or minus three years), pairs of stockings in the drawer begin to fornicate, copulate or otherwise multiply to make new socks. Usually they make bastard socks that don’t match anything else in the drawer, so you can’t blame any one pair. In this way, even if one throws away all the lonesome socks from the dryer, the stocking drawer continues to fill up with non-matching socks. For the average seventy plus person this can be really disconcerting, because it takes longer for an old man just to find and put on socks anyway. When they are mixed with bastard singleton socks it can add half an hour to the process of getting dressed, and if one doesn’t have a patient partner, it can mean that you have missed breakfast.

Fortunately I am a puppeteer, and I know what to do with bastard single socks, I just throw them into a mesh bag, and when I have enough, I do a sock puppet workshop in an elementary school and use them all up. I am afraid if the teachers knew where they all came from they wouldn’t allow me to give them to the children, so I am depending on all you to keep it mum. SSHHHH! (When I was doing puppet workshops constantly I used to go to Laundromats and ask them for orphan socks. Almost every Laundromat has a big boxful in the back room.) The teachers then didn’t know where they came from either or I probably would have been arrested for persecuting orphans. Well, so much for socks.

Maybe next post I will go back to politics. I am getting more and more frustrated with the governmental blame game that is going about Kristina. I also have some choice thoughts about Rush Limbaugh. I would like to have some choice thoughts about Al Franken, but he has never said anything memorable enough to get angry about.