Colorful Socks and Life's Inexorable Horror — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Whenever I make a major purchase, I have two primary sets of criteria to consider. The first is, “Do I genuinely need or want this thing? Will owning it bring me pleasure or joy or meaning? Is it something that will improve my quality of life, even a little bit?”

The second is more practical. I ask myself, “When everything goes to shit and I’m struggling just to get by and keep my head above water, will I be able to sell this in exchange for desperately needed money?”

Super Bowl weekend, for example, I once again found myself in “What do I have on hand that I can sell to get by?” mode and thankfully I had a whole bunch of copies of The Weird Accordion to Al in my nursery closet I could sell, and quickly, for cold, hard, American cash money.

As this second question conveys, I am perpetually cognizant of the gutter, the bottom, the worst case scenario. I don’t have the luxury of not having to perpetually worry about what I will do when the bottom falls out. It wasn’t always that way but having children and the implosion of pop culture media changed that.

That’s why I like to have things in my life between me and the bottom, things that are silly and superficial and the product of a world where everyone is not constantly struggling in ways that seem permanent and unfixable, terminal and overwhelming.

That’s why I got it in my head a few years back that what I REALLY needed was for my family to buy me a subscription to one of those colorful socks of the month clubs as a present, preferably a Father’s Day present.

Like so many of my ideas, good or bad, this came from the world of podcasting, specifically podcast advertising. Though I don’t think I’ve ever actually bought anything on the basis of podcast advertising their pitches always seem way more appealing to me than they probably should.

If nothing else, they fuel my curiosity. What does a new mattress that comes to your door in a small box even look like? What manner of sinister juju was employed in making a mattress fit into such a tiny, unnatural shape?

But no podcast advertisement tantalized me quite as much as the ones for colorful socks of the month clubs. Maybe it’s the dad in me. No, it’s DEFINITELY the dad in me but for some reason my forty-three year old brain can conceive of few things more appealing than services that promise to bring distinctive, brightly patterned socks to your front door every month, like clockwork, without having to go to the store.

I have large feet with thick toenails as hard as diamonds and twice as black as midnight so my hideous demon hooves horrify and disturb my wife to the point that she perpetually thinks I’m in need of a pedicure. My sharp feet-claws have a disconcerting habit of tearing violently through ordinary socks but I was overjoyed to discover that that wasn’t the case when my wife finally took months, if not years, of hints and got me a socks of the month club subscription that has long since passed.

I was overjoyed to discover that not only did delighting in the magnificence of my colorful socks distract me from life’s inexorable horrors but the socks were much better made as well, and did not quickly fall apart the way my other ones did.

I love my colorful sock collection, modest as it might be. Sure, it’s a challenge keeping socks from going missing but it’s worth it. So if you also are overwhelmed by life, why not follow my lead and get something so silly that its mere existence stands in bold defiance of the idea that life is a tragedy and not a wacky comedy?