What do you call a t-shirt, clean and still warm from the dryer, that’s now sitting in a big pile in the middle of the closet?

Mine!

I guess you might say that I have somewhat of a hanger-shortage in my house … note, specifically *I* am experiencing this particular shortage – my wife is, in fact, doing just fine in the overall hanger department.  I mean, you walk through her side of the closet at any given time and hangers are in wild abundance, roaming and frolicking free without a care in the world!  Mine, on the other hand … my four hangers can usually be found huddled meekly in the corner, gazing overwhelmed at that mountain of clean t-shirts towering over the landscape, wondering how in the world they’re supposed to carry that kind of weight all by their lonesomes.

Come nightfall, taunting jeers from my wife’s army of hangers can be heard mockingly from closet rods high and low…

Now don’t get me wrong – I know she doesn’t mean to do it.  Well, at least I don’t think she means to, anyways – magically coming up with another seven or eight shirts to monopolize the latest 10-pack of hangers that I just brought home to try and get some of my own clothes off the floor!  And it doesn’t even matter how many I buy – one, a dozen, or even a whole pallet-full – sometimes I feel like I’m single-handedly sustaining the hanger department of my local Walmart, one 99-cent bundle of plastic hangers at a time, and yet what do I have to show for it?!

Granted, I do recognize that this is somewhat of a unique situation, as I know that most couples end up fighting over the closet space itself, and yet “space” is actually something that I’ve got oodles of!  We’re fortunate enough to be blessed with a pretty ridiculously large closet, to the point where I could probably throw down a cot and take refuge in it if need be (you know, like if a sudden need to hide from my wife arises after outing her hanger-hoarding tendencies to the 14 people who read this column).  I’ve got space galore – I just can’t hang anything in it!!!

The more I think about it, clearly there’s only one real solution to this problem – it’s time to invent a new, hanger-free method for storing my clothes, and no, “folding” ain’t gonna cut it, either.  We’re talking something truly innovative, like using miniature tractor beams to float my shirts loose and wrinkle-free around the closet in a manner that would make Darth Vader proud!  Or maybe I could pick up a bunch of discarded mannequins from department stores to arrange my clothes in more realistic, life-like positions … although I can already predict that one coming to a rather creepy halt if I ever find myself up for a drink of water in the middle of the night and manage to catch a glimpse of my own clothes watching me from just inside the closet door!

I’m dedicated to finding a fix to this desperate dilemma, though, no matter how extreme and arguably unnecessary it may seem.  Maybe I’ll have to sneak into the closet in the middle of the night and raid hangers away from my wife’s clothes, maybe I’ll subsequently have to lay low in there myself until the heat dies down – really, whatever it takes … I think if anything, I owe my t-shirts that much…

…except for that tie-dyed one from a decade ago that probably wouldn’t fit unless I invented a time machine to jump back to my high school days – why do I even have that one anymore?!

Selection of the Ones That Actually Fit, it is – one down, seventeen more to go!