Overwhelmed

My name is Tom Black, and today the first snow of the season fell.

I was sitting in the living room of my town home, watching Ernest Goes to Camp for the final time today, participating in the human condition, and drinking a Jeremy Laurence. The ending credits were rolling by while a wretched late 80's guitar solo screeched, when suddenly I flew to the window with a mad charge and ripped the blinds apart. It was only six o'clock, but it was black as midnight outside. This filled my soul with overwhelming dread and I had to struggle for a brief moment to fight off a momentary attack of existential anxiety. Thankfully it subsided, but I was wary for the rest of the evening, lest it happen again.

The darkness was overwhelming. Winter always brings this familiar feeling back, the feeling forgotten by the rest of the seasons. Autumn makes everybody go mad as hatters, but winter,- winter is overwhelming. By the time the grind of the day has subsided, it's black as pitch and the darkness suffocates the remaining hours. Six o'clock feels like midnight, seven like one, and by the time midnight actually rolls around I'm hardly even sure I still exist anymore. It is surely a terrifying lifestyle, but someone has to do it.

My Jeremy Laurence had made me red in the face enough to actually consider doing my laundry which had been heaped unceremoniously in a corner of my room, and it was really becoming quite the mountain.

Out of all the pitiless, menial tasks my life is filled with, laundry has to be one of the worst. I find it cloying and joyless. The level of satisfaction I receive from doing laundry is so minimal it almost makes the task not worth it. It's a confining, laborious two hour period where I have to remain grounded to my domicile in order to move soggy piles of clothes a mere foot into a drying receptacle. Then, most odious of all, I have to fold the insidious garments. I would much rather trade jobs with Sisyphus for a year than fold laundry.

I digress however. My laundry had become quite the elephant in the room, not only because it had a very poignant presence to all of the senses, but because it quite literally may have been the size of a baby elephant. I as well believed it had consumed my Macroeconomics textbook. It really wasn't an elephant though as much as it was a black hole. I entered my room determined to wage war on the offending pieces of cotton and polyester, but upon seeing it I was immediately intimidated. I beat a hasty retreat downstairs to mix a gin to get my courage up. By the time I had drank three and watched Ernest Scared Stupid half way through, I suddenly remembered I was doing laundry and quickly dashed up the stairs to once more engage in mortal combat with the pile. My nerves were of steel by now, so without even a moments hesitation I stuffed the load into an impossibly small bag and ran down stairs to purge them in the washing machine. I've never really been a big advocate of "sorting" clothes, or really anything for that matter, so I jammed about half the ball into the washing machine, which was a near herculean task, poured a liberal amount of detergent into the mouth of the machine, wantonly twisted some dials and brought the washer to life. I had worked myself into quite a rage at this point, so in order to calm down I decided to finish my Ernest movie.

The next day I woke up with a washer filled with moldy clothes, ten pink (once white) shirts, half a pile of dirty laundry, and a partially dissolved copy of Exploring Macroeconomics.

It was a dreadful Friday, but I could be utterly wrong because it's winter, and I feel a bit overwhelmed in winter