A Meditation on Mismatched Socks

    Promiscuity seems inevitable if you have a mind steeped in pathos and loneliness. Of course this loneliness is from our own excuses; anyone can find someone so long as they stop thinking about it and submit to the obvious banal reality that most of us are simply average. I write this still believing the contrary: I do not believe I am average. I do indeed believe I am unique, special, even exceptional.          
    Call it narcissism. Thus, promiscuity remains.
    When things fall into the right place at just the right time, day or night; when the right person chooses to, yes, engage and reciprocate: unchained sexual interaction. All of us can be clever and attractive as long as we remain at least partially social and self-aware beasts.
    Here's a disclaimer; an awkward, but important distinction: I'm not including rape in this thought process. Rape is a act outside of modern moral code despite what some awful person has argued. In its literal sense it is wrong. Of course information gets mucked up in translation, and this is why I'm scratching it out of the dialogue from the get go. Tragically it will always happen somewhere, but that is not what this is about.
    There are strange mementos which linger in my laundry. I have roughly twenty unmatched socks that drift between my hamper and my washer and dryer. They are all women's socks. They are all socks from women who have shared my bed -maybe once, maybe multiple times. They seem to be mementos for me, even if it is solely by mistake. I have kept them. I do not do anything unsettling with them, such as smell them from time to time, nor do a worship them pitifully as icons of female footdom; knowing these socks once sheathed these women's lower phalanges. I consider things such as this creepy, but apparently not creepy enough for me not to write about it.
    I keep them as one keeps old photographs.
    It's inexplicable because I never willfully seek out these items. I simply find them around my room when I decide to clean. They are strange symbols of fleeting happiness through sanitary, peticurial coincidence. They occupy my mind rarely, but surely.
    The women who have left these sleeves of foot cloth are all beautiful. This, to me, seems slightly misogynistic in a relatively unique way; no matter these women's shapes or sizes all of them are beautiful. They are complimented on the way they look on a regular basis. I seek this true beauty out, which is a very "artist" thing to do. I will provide examples: Edgar Degas, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt. Even the Catholic Church has artists such as Bernini or Botticelli.
    Ugly is an impossible thing to define, but I know it with all my senses. Everyone is capable of being ugly, so long as you spend enough time with them. Acceptance of that will help you realize how beautiful and true one can and can't be. I have learned this in part because of mismatched socks; socks to whose feet I can no longer distinguish... at least not by choice of color, pattern and wear-ability.