I know what you’re thinking — what a title, eh? What follows may sound made up, but I swear to you that every word of it is true.

Before I moved out to Phoenix, Arizona, where I now live, sleep and breathe Stargate Worlds, I lived in rainy St. Louis with my parents, two dogs, a hamster and the occasional fish that could manage to stay alive. He was something of an urban legend in my house. A thief. A thief of underwears. I kid you not.

I’m sure my family is like most other families. We buy underwear as we need them. Well, in my house we needed them quite often, because when washing day came my underwears would leave the hamper to be cleaned … and not all would make it back from the battlefield.

My mother, God bless her, was routinely doing laundry every four or five days in my house. She would call me out of my bedroom and I would see my stack of clean essentials on the table in the living room. “What the heck,” I would say upon picking them up. “What,” my mom would ask. “There are four pair here. You haven’t washed in six days … I’m missing two pair!” And it was so. Someone, or some thing, had absconded with several sets of these necessary undergarments. It wouldn’t happen often, but it would happen enough that I would see diminished height in my stack over the course of a few months.

Well, since those days I have moved out to sunny Arizona, where I have the privilege of washing my own underwear. I recently took these clothes of mine home with me for the holidays, where my mother would get reacquainted with them for the next two weeks. As I’m packing my bags on New Years Eve, I turn to my mother. “What the heck,” I said. “What,” my mom said. “There are six pair here. I came to St. Louis with TWELVE! He’s back!” “Maybe you didn’t bring as many as you thought,” said my mom. And I considered that point. So I put the matter aside until I could come home and investigate my drawers for myself. And sure enough, I had taken 12 with me to St. Louis.

I don’t know who you are or what your problem is, but I know where you stalk. And when next I’m home, you and I are going to have a prisoner exchange.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.