And, once again, to clarify, I'm not even looking for two of the same exact sock.  When I say a pair of socks, all I'm looking for is two socks of approximately the same length and thickness.  Wearing different color socks has never been a problem for me.  I can still remember rolling into high school, deep into autumn, rocking knee-high wool sockings (half socks, half stockings), one a mixture of purple and black with light green stripes, the other dark green and blue with black stripes.  Under sandals.  

I've always been kinda weird.  Anyway, the point here is that colors be damned, I just don't like to wear one ankle-length sock with another calf length one.  It throws off my equilibrium.  Similarly, I'm no fan of one big wool sock with one athletic sock.  Nothing stranger than the sensation of one foot sweating.  

And lately, it's become harder and harder to meet these very minimal foot coverage requirements.  To the point that I'm actually wearing those pairs of socks that get hidden in the back of the drawer, banished for being way too tight to wear but still entirely too new just to throw away.  My shame socks.  I'm wearing them right now.  Literally and figuratively.

But yesterday evening, my phone rang and I excused myself to go upstairs to our bedroom to talk, so as not to be rude to my wife and her Castle addiction.  As I was hopping onto the bed, I spotted three socks on the floor, stragglers, strewn like fallen soldiers grasping for daylight before the carnivorous dust bunnies that live underneath our bed enveloped them.  There was something about that third sock, the way it was half occluded from my view by the bedskirt (hells yah we have a bedskirt on our bed), that prompted me to investigate further.  

Now on all fours, I swept up the bedskirt like a heavy velvet curtain synched to the wings as the play begins.  In this case, however, no actors graced the stage, but rather a virtual Smurf-village of socks.  The architectural magnitude of which would lead you to believe that some subspecies of Doozers that worked only with socks (instead of the traditional radish based candy sticks), had made camp in the shade of our bed frame. 

The mother load.  A stream of socks trickling from the far leg of the queen-sized bed down to the impressive delta branching out in front of me.  And so I began harvesting my long lost footwear, the scythe of my arm reaping bundles of 4 or 5 socks with each horizontal slash.  Then I walked around to the other side of the bed to retrieve those socks whose jailbreak almost led them to the promised land of my wife's bedside table. 

Put in a pile, I had gathered about a half load of laundry, consisting solely of socks and a stray pair of boxers.  I had also decimated much of the fluffy white carnivorous warren.  In order to maximize the comedic value of the discovery of this hidden treasure, I foolishly bent down and gathered the pile in my hugging arms in order to show out my bounty to my loving wife.

That's when the man-eating dust bunnies attacked.  They dissolved themselves into the air I was inhaling and I began instantly dry heaving -- the socks being re-scattered across the bedroom floor.

So much for surprising my wife like a Pirate King.  Instead, I had her calling up the stairs to make sure her fearless captain wasn't accidentally asphyxiating himself.  Very bold.  Very courageous.

Oxygen once again flowing to my brain, I removed any remaining rapid rabbits from the sock pile, and more cautiously picked up the beach ball of orphaned socks.  I brought them to the downstairs landing, looked my wife in the eye, and deadpanned, "Honey, I found my socks.  They were under the bed.  All of them."

"Holy Crap! You sure did," she responded.  Herself a bedroom collector of water glasses, she could appreciate the magnitude of both this discovery and its reveal. "How did that . . . happen?"

"A VERY good question," I responded.  The quality of the question due mostly to the fact that I had spent the majority of the past 15 minutes working out its answer.

"Every night, when you are in bed asleep, I tuck the dogs into their bed, and then I attempt to slide into our bed next to you, without waking you up.  In order for this plan to have any chance at all," I continue, "I need to take care of all of my own bedtime needs in the dressing room, before opening the bedroom door.  Which I do.  The puppies patiently wait until I have undressed and then we all go forth together into the darkness of the bedroom.  But the floor is just so damn cold!  I just can't bear to remove the warm cushion between the icy floor and my tender footpad.  So I wait.  I put the dogs in their bed, and then I sit on the edge of ours.  I set my alarm, remove my socks, and then it is 'quick-under-the-covers'."  

"Please throw the blanket over us Dad!"

"Of course, by the time I get out of bed the next morning, that same strip of floor has already seen a few comings and goings of both human and doggie traffic.  The result of which, it now appears, is that my socks get pushed just far enough to tuck themselves under the near corner of bed.  Over time, the socks formed an organic Coin Pusher-like carnival game, where each new discarded pair of socks nudged the growing pile in an inward migration towards inaccessibility."

Like this, but with socks . . .

So yah, now it's laundry time fo reals.