The Inside of Out

The Inside of Out

“If you turn it inside out, then the outside will be technically on the inside, while in fact being on the outside, right?”

“Why would you want or need to know that?”

“If you wash your closes after turning them inside out, the lint that clings to everything will be on the inside where you don’t see it.”

“Yes, but you’ve added two extra steps to your washing process.  If you were to encapsulate the amount of extra time needed and determine the time to benefit ratio, after years of doing laundry you would probably have logged enough hours to ask for a refund or dispensation from your minister.  Which would you prefer?

 If you consider your time worth, let’s say the minimum wage, which I know hasn’t changed in twenty years, but then with inflation and the economy rolling backwards, you lost much more than you would presume, had you not begun turning clothing items into time benefit ratios; shall we say $10.00 dollars an hour if we were to round up?

Take that $10.00 dollars per hour, add to it the time spent that you’ve documented in that little pad you keep hanging from the hook next to the washing machine, multiply that times ten and you will realize you could have purchased an entire wardrobe and not have had the worry brought on by lint.”

“You are probably right, but you didn’t look at the time necessary to remove the lint from clothing not turned inside out. You ever tried to remove, yellow lint from a pair of black cotton jogging pants? I would guess not, I’ve never seen you move faster than a tortoise at its highest speed. Anyways, it takes a considerable amount of time, which if you are concerned with the accuracy of the time to benefit ratio, it needs to be included with the time spent turning clothing inside out. Do you agree?”

“Most certainly! All variables need to considered when looking for the accuracy I can only expect you’d be interested in, being the perfectionist you claim to be. But then to remain accurate, so as not to throw off the possible savings by giving more credit to the removal when not turning things inside out, you need to consider what you have to do with the lint once it’s removed. I can only assume it’s part of the cost incurred when looking at time having a value, even if it is an inaccurate value because of the lackadaisical attitude of whoever in the government is in charge of adjusting the minimum wage, it being a reflection of the rising costs added to everything due to inflation. And where do you get yellow lint? Mine is always milky white.

And then there’s what do you do with the lint you remove, regardless of the color, and do you put the lint you retrieve from the clothing itself, with the lint the dryer trap collects during the drying process. I assume your dryer removes some if not all the lint manufactured during the washing process?”

“That is a good and inclusive question, as well as a deduction. If we are to include inclusiveness, then do we need to subtract for the lint that goes down the drain and the cost associated with it at the treatment plant? If you have, let’s say minimally a town of 25,000 residents, making up about 6.5 thousand homes, assuming each home has approximately 4 residents, and they all have clothes to wash, you can imagine that, and I’m guessing here, 20% of the lint goes to the plant to be removed. If it is removed, it has to go somewhere, which I am suggesting goes to the landfill. Now, if you want to be birds eye exact, we can call Buda.  You know, the bald guy on our bowling team who never talks to anyone. He works at the water treatment plant. I’m sure he could give us an accurate accounting of how much lint is captured in a month and we can extrapolate from there. Is that agreeable to you?”

“I guess it will have to be. I normally attempt to not involve friends, family, and people who work at the water treatment plant, but then I suppose you’re right in that he would know, withing a few hundred pounds, what the plant disposes of each month. I should mention that we need to agree on how long a study this going to be. I would hope at least a year, if we are looking just for averages, that is one thing, but I was hoping more for the sake of accuracy, maybe five years or possibly ten. You got any objections to that?”

“No, I can see your point about averages, as opposed to just taking the results from just the one year. With all the ups and downs of the economy right now, the first thing people do is cut back on doing laundry. And when you cut back on laundry you are probably using less soap, which means the people at the store aren’t selling as much, and you know where that leads. First it’s the soap, then next, if I’m deducing from past trends, toilet paper, and then paper plates and from there on it’s a race to the bottom and there isn’t any one there to catch you.

The government sure isn’t going to take the blame for grocery stores not selling soap and running out of toilet paper, we know that for a fact. But what bothers me most is that a friend or acquaintance who is determining the amount of lint, might get laid off, when we are just beginning our study of lint; where does it go, and how much and where it is being disposed of? For all we know, enough lint gets by their filters, I can assume they have filters, to start a pillow factory.  But then if the EPA is out of the picture because of cutbacks so they can give the wealthy more by not charging them taxes, our washing machines could be polluting the entire river after it leches out of the golf course and municipal parks lawns, and what remains of the EPA wouldn’t know anything about it being the cause for starting another superfund site. You did know the water from the treatment plant is used to water municipal properties? It is the reason on hot days everything smells funky. 

We might just have a bigger problem than we anticipated. Do you think we are going to need reinforcements? I know my wife isn’t busy, and she’s the one who usually does the laundry. You know, now that we are on the subject, I don’t rightly know if she turns my clothes inside out or not. I’d never thought to ask, cause why would I. I’m not like you always trying to find new ways to do old stuff. I think you’ve got a knack for that kind of thing, and I just haven’t got one; don’t think the wife does either.”

“You think we are getting ahead of ourselves a little. You got us in a major depression, where people can’t wash clothes more than a couple of times a month, the bottom is falling out of the soap business, and friends or acquaintances are getting laid off because they don’t have enough to do, not to mention the stress on your wife knowing that she is a participant in this whole mess. I’m assuming of course you are going to tell her?

Let’s take a deep breath and decide if this is pushing us toward WWIII, or we are making a mountain out of Bulah Hill, which some people who have never been anywhere believe it’s a mountain, no matter how many National Geographic pictures I’ve shown them. And as far as your wife goes, I hope you didn’t take no never mind about me saying things about lint being all her… but now that I come to think on it, you are the one who dragged her into the lint business. Well, either way, neither of us is trying to make things worse, even though we are on the verge of a potential disaster brought on by lint.”

“Do you think five years is going to be a long enough study?  Maybe two or three years will be tied up in a recession and then followed up by a depression, where no one is buying soap or doing laundry. I was thinking when you were talking about Beulah Hill, that they had themselves a depression of their own at one time, like back in 41’ or 42’… before one of our wars. Maybe it was 1931, in between wars but before the skirmishes started…my mind ain’t as good with dates like it was when we was a bit younger, so please forgive my lapses.

Anyway…now I remember… it was during the flapper times in the 20’s when everything was peachy according to the papers and everyone let their hair down and thought we was riding the high tide and it was never going to end. They built all them mansions up there on Bulah Hill; big enough houses to see them from my front porch on days when the clouds stay up where they is supposed to. Then something happened in the 30’s that brought the whole thing down.  All them houses got repossessed by the bank which went out of business right after it foreclosed on them. I don’t remember if it had anything to do with farmers dumping milk in the streets or not.

Do you remember No Joints Hepplewhite? He got the job of turning them big houses into duplexes and apartments; we were in a housing crisis, not because people couldn’t find a place to live, they just couldn’t afford the price of what was being asked. Some conglomerate was blamed for buying up all the housing stock and cornering the market; they could then charge what they liked. 

Hepplewhite told everyone he was a jack of all trades, and people believed him. I’d known him since grade school, and I can attest to the fact he wasn’t no jack of all trades, jackass maybe, but even that is stretching his abilities quite some.

The bank, after the government said they were needed too much to fail, opened up again, and because of the times and money being worth about as much as you wanted it to be and others didn’t, they were too busy to keep an eye on old No Joints. 

By the time they figured out what was going on, he was set to retire on a pension he’d somehow managed to work into his contract. Well, anyway, when the bank went to see what he was doing to the big houses, they couldn’t believe it, but then they hadn’t paid attention to the fact that No Joints had a near-sighted problem that made everything, because of the glasses he got at the thrift store, bigger than they actually was. Turned out they was bifocal and he was looking out the wrong half of the glass. 

You ever try cooking in a four-by-five-foot kitchen? The bedroom in the place I stayed in for about a week, was totally taken up by the bed. The dresser I had to put in the hall, if you could call that two-foot trail a hall, and I broke four toes in just one night trying to find the bathroom in the dark, cause the electric switch for the bathroom was down by the front door, and I wasn’t going down the steps in the dark. The risers varied considerable, from four inches to nine and a half inches, and I’m not even goin to bring up how level they weren’t. I was sure happy I’d quit drinking or I’d probably be in the cemetery where the old uranium mine was, before they turned it into a playground for the kids who could afford to go to school. 

The whole thing turned into a mess and we were all glad when the depression hit. Nothing makes people feel better than when everyone suffers equally. We’d been so bad off that we didn’t know there was a depression, until we got into the war and the uranium mine reopened so we could build a secret bomb that was going to revolutionize war. guess it did, we only had four or five wars since then, so people say it’s working but the mine is still closed.

Talking about mines, it brings up the possibility that if those uranium pits aren’t needed anymore, maybe we should suggest instead of burying the lint in the landfill, we bury it in the mine. No one is allowed down there anyway, so who’s it going to hurt, and it’ll keep the landfill from overflowing like it did last year when we had the second hundred-year flood in two weeks and then had to build another landfill higher up on Beulah Hill, and this time they had to put some kind of liner in, so the rotting stuff didn’t get into our drinking water. You ever had your kitchen faucet catch fire cause you was smokin next to it? I did, and it wasn’t a pretty sight; burned the curtains and dirtied the window to where I couldn’t see out to know if the mail had come or not. It was a mess.”

“Do you think we could find a use for all that lint if we put our minds to it?”

“Funny you should mention that. I was thinking if we can get them to put the lint in the uranium mines, we let the lint sit there a bit and then get some of those illegal green card people from over in Jackson to fish it out for a reduced rate, I think we might just be able to sell radiated stuff to the army or navy; whoever pays the best. It would be like having a nuclear deterrent that ain’t really nuclear but as close as you are going get without blowin up the whole world, just the people who get exposed to it.”

“I like that idea. Kind of like killing two jackalopes with one bullet. We are going to have to strike while the iron is hot though, before people find out what we are planning. You know how them environmentalists are when it comes to nuclear and war, not to mention water and air. They seem to like to get behind causes that might change the trajectory of how things are done, compared to how they used to be done.

If we take five years to test our lint before turning it into a weapon of war, somebody else, who has less ambition but more greed, might just beat us to it. How about we shorten the time to about six weeks? That would give us enough time to see about getting one of those no bid contracts where you can charge whatever you want cause the government ain’t paying for it, the tax payers is, and you know how the government don’t pay attention when they ain’t paying. We should be able to get cleared by the EPA, so we don’t have to have hazmat people running all over the place making sure things is safe, before we can sell the uranium ladened lint to the military; we’d be making our money proactive to top it off. 

We keep on thinking like this and we can move up on the hill into one of them old mansions that No Joints didn’t get around to minimizing. I wonder what happened to him anyway? He still owes me a consulting fee for looking at the viability of putting swimming pools in every backyard. I told him I didn’t think just blasting a hole in the limestone was going to be good enough to qualify as a pool, unless we marketed the houses to those folks that like to go around hugging trees and praying for clean water and air. And do you know why they called him No Joints?”

“You sure are right about striking while the iron is hot. Just be mindful of the curtains. I been there and done that, and it cuts into your thinking time more than you’d expect. Oh, he had some disease that messed with the Jell-O around where the bones meet and are supposed to move without creaking. That’s why he walked like a spaghetti puppet.”

“I’ll be a remembering that. Tomorrow then?”

“Tomorrow! Wait, can we make it Tuesday, I’ve got to get my bowling shirt re-embroidered. Had a problem with putting too much of what I thought was bleach in the washer. Turned out it was lye, ate a Rhorezockian hole right where the black rose used to be. The irregular hole looks just like our president, but I ain’t saying which one.

And if you wouldn’t mind telling me what the EPA is supposed to be doing, I’d appreciate it.”