The Sock Outlet Store On La Calle Desconocida

Live With Style

Dark socks do not all look alike.

I mean, they do if you look at them from a distance, but when you get right up close, such as when you are holding them before you preparatory to sliding them on your taloned feet, you notice that there are minute differences suddenly in the two socks that had hitherto constituted a pair.

They do not match. The one you are holding has a slight bargello-like design hidden in the black-on-black weave, while the other has some sort of darkish-blueish coal dust colored chevron pattern.

So this contamination spreads immediately by Sock Quantum Entanglement, for it was established in early 20th century physics that when two socks were brought close to each other and bundled military style, if the two socks were mismatched, then instantaneously exactly two other similarly mismatching socks were created in the far reaches of the universe... or the sock drawer.
And they are hard to find once you knot them military style. Military style is when you roll them up and take the outer sock and push the inner sock through the opening of the outer sock....  It is like you are actually creating a topological Klein-bottle of hosiery.
Once you open up that Moebius strip-like torus of the outer sock and push the other sock through the "wormhole" and created that bundle of sock, well, there is now no way to find "entangled" mismatching pairs short of undoing all the knots of socks.

And one requires good lighting, because the differences between socks can be vanishingly small. I mean, I had one mismatched pair of blacks where one had a minute blue guy on a horse, who for all the world looked like he was ready to play a chukker of some sort of game on horseback, and the other had a scene from a slaughter house. (She-who-must--be-obeyed said it was the Brooks Brothers logo, but to my tired, squinting eyes - I did not have my sock inspector's loupe that day - it looked like a pig on a meat hook. Brrrr!)

So I had to re-do all the socks. I had had two singletons laying about, waiting for such an occasion when all socks are made manifest, and I did match them up. However, I still ended up with an unmatched single.
It was sad.
A sock without a name.
Calcetín sin nombre... reminding me of Jorge Luís Borges and his Sock Drawer Of The Forking Paths, just turn left on the Calle Desconocida.

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