Wormholes

For years I thought that I was hopelessly forgetful and disorganized because I kept misplacing things like (but not limited to) my keys, wallet and work ID.

I was wrong.

What really happens I spontaneous create personal wormholes, which swallow these objects and hold them for an indefinite period.

A wormhole,, as defined in "Star Trek: Deep Space 9" and "Star Trek: Voyager," is a kind of secret passageway to another part of the universe. It can travel not just through space but also through time (and I guess through mind, if your next stop is The Twilight Zone).

Further, these wormholes do not act randomly. They may actually be a form of subconscious organization. The word "subconscious" is crucial. It's what makes this so troublesome.

Certain things are regularly stashed in wormholes--my keys, wallet and bank cards. This can be explained my their importance to and regular use by me. My watch often falls into this category, too, and I am helpless without it.

Fortunately, wormholes seem to affect only objects that I regularly carry with me. This means calendars and clocks have so far been immune, a matter of great benefit since I would otherwise never know even the time or date.

An early manifestation of this phenomenon was the Disc Washer, that furry cylinder that was used in the 1970s and 1980s to clean the dust from phonograph records with great efficiency. Disc Washers often vanished inexplicably, only to spontaneously reappear right where they should have been, in front of the turntable.

The wormhole talent did not spring fully blown from nothing. As a boy, I recall my mother several times putting things away in a Very Safe Place, and then not being able to recover them. Whatever the mechanism, it's not hard to see a connection.

Now, I have thought about this in some depth. For years I have held that things are only messy because you haven't yet found the right place to store them (a principle brilliantly described in the immortal phrase "where it b'longs"). In an effort to transform the clutter of my life into greater organization, my theory goes, I have subconsciously created "b'longing" places for things--pocket universes, or places somewhere else in space or time--and stashed them there.

The only problem is that I don't consciously (yet) know how to retrieve them. So far, the best method is to repeatedly turn the house upside down, especially in several places where I most probably last saw the item in question. Eventually, the desired object pops out of the wormhole and my search is over.

This method is far from optimum, but like many things, I believe it can be improved with practice. Unfortunately, to obtain more practice, I will need to ... lose a lot more things faster.

Fortunately, I am all over this one.