Too Many Towels
I don't understand the process by which towels multiply. I rarely purchase towels. I am seldom in situations conducive to inadvertent towel acquisition. I do not get drunk, break into people's houses and steal their towels for the raw thrill of it. I do not frequent towel-intensive locations such as beaches, spas, bathhouses or places that are just generally leaky and damp, so there is no reason why I would somehow accidentally pack up an extra towel or two as I was gathering my things to leave.
Yet the number of towels in my closet seems to increase steadily. The reason for this eludes me like elves in a colander factory. (That analogy makes no sense to me, either.) I would like to point out that that I do not have a dedicated towel closet — NOT THAT THERE IS ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT — where towels might naturally gravitate to socialize with their own kind. I don't even have a linen closet where towels and their distant textile cousins the sheets and pillowcases might mingle along with their common ancestor, the blankets. No, I live in a crappy apartment with a single catch-all closet in my room, where obsolete video-game equipment must coexist with clothes, shoes and pornography. Towels have their own segregated district within this complex multicultural mishmash.
Yet there are more towels every time I check. Is someone sneaking into my room and putting towels in my closet? If so, why? If it's just to increase the level of random surreal entropy in New York, bravo. Well played. But I kind of doubt that. It's just too interesting, and interesting things never happen to me.
So I decided to test this phenomenon. I counted the towels; there were four. I closed the closet door and then opened it again. I counted the towels: five. I closed the closet door and re-opened it a second time. Now there were seven. I repeated the experiment, and counted eleven towels. The next time there were 19, then after that 35. Soon I lost count and could no longer shut the door. But the towels continued to increase in number at an ever-accelerating rate. Soon I was pressed up against the wall, unable to move. Then the apartment exploded, and I found myself riding a great surging tidal wave of towels down Roosevelt Avenue. All that thick, soft, absorbent terrycloth soaked up the East River. By now the towels numbered in the billions, and I was at the vanguard of a mass of multicolored fabric plowing across the Midwest. Once the number climbed into the octillions, the surface of America was engulfed. Soon all the world will be covered. Eventually, the mass of towels will form a sphere expanding through space at the speed of light, ultimately consuming the universe in its final, fluffy fate.
I'm sorry, humanity. I'm so very sorry.