I Lose So Much Stuff

Sometimes someone will tell you about a personal issue they have and you can only assume they mean it comically. So, you react with laughter only to find out it’s a bigger issue to them than you thought.

I have a seriously bad history with cheesecake.

Ha ha. Me too. I can’t stay away.

No. You don’t understand. My family was murdered in a cheesecake factory by a man in a cheesecake costume.

Oh, wow. Sorry. We, uh, can order the carrot cake instead.

Yeah. Well, my cheesecake moment is losing stuff. I lose things – many things, many times, in many different ways. It has gone from funny ha-ha to funny throw-my-television-out-the-window-in-a-fit-of-rage.

I’m not talking about long term losses. We all have that missing baseball cap or pair of headphones that you might have left at Red Lobster. I’ve had those too. I’ve even had those moments of walking around in circles looking for my phone, only to find it sitting on my desk, in plain sight. Those, however, are separate issues.

I’m talking about losing things the moment I hold them. I’m talking about walking into a room with a book, putting it down, and then, in many cases, never seeing that book again. It is beyond maddening and, the worst part is that many times it’s completely my fault.

When I say “my fault”, I don’t mean because I accidentally lost it. I mean “my fault” because a lot of the time, I purposely hide them on myself.

Yes. That’s what I wrote. I know how it sounds. Allow me to explain this nightmarish game I play for no apparent reason.

While cleaning a room or rearranging things, I will sometimes take an item I need like my eyeglasses and place them on a tabletop. That’s when a voice in my head will say, “Don’t just leave them on the table. You’ll drop them from this big open table and break them. You should put them somewhere safe.”

So, like a dope, I will place them behind a standing picture frame or cable box, just enough that they can’t be seen at all by people who might want to run over and knock them to floor. Five minutes later, I have completely forgotten about doing this and realize my glasses are nowhere to be found. I proceed to run around the house for an hour, looking in corners that I have never been in before, and cursing myself out the whole way.

You’re an idiot. How many times are you going to do this? You lose everything. You know what? You don’t deserve glasses. Live in a blurry world, idiot.

I cleaned up the language, but that’s the gist of it. If no one else is around, I will say these things out loud. Don’t tell anyone, but it’s true. If I ever had someone become obsessed with me and hide spy cameras in my house, they would see this routine once and say, “I’m not obsessed with this dude anymore. That ain’t right.”

Do you know how many remotes I have for the television in my office? Six. That’s right. Six of the exact same remote. The TV came with one. When I saw online that they were less than $10 each, I purchased in bulk. Remotes were some of the easiest items to lose. Want proof? I have six. I’ve bought about ten.

You’d think that losing things in your house would mean you would eventually find them in your house, right? Wrong. I know because we moved to a new home last year. The day we left, I didn’t find that freakin’ Lego Dimensions Batman, any missing remotes, or so many other items that I thought would be waiting to hop on the moving van with the Tasmanian Devils we hired to gorilla throw our furniture. The best I could do was shrug and say, “The house ate them.”

Not all of these missing items are the fault of playing hide-and-seek with my subconscious. Some are just the universe kicking me in the face. The time I lost my car keys plays into that. They were gone without a trace and I felt like I had done everything except rip the insulation out of the walls. Sure, I had a second set, but who wants to think that a copy of their car keys are floating around alone in the world like Finding Nemo? Luckily, there had just been a big snowstorm, so I had plenty of time to circle the house trying to find them.

It wasn’t until four days later, when the snow started to melt, that I saw them…on the front lawn popping out from the dripping remnants of winter. They had been hidden underneath the whole time and all that searching was for nothing. It was like a four-day game of picking things up and putting them back down.

I’ve lost tiny things like Christmas decorations and big things like a $75 Home Depot gift card that my wife didn’t even know about until…well, until she read that sentence. I can’t even tell you how frustrating it is. The only positive is that losing stuff into thin air is the number one reason why I clean my closet.

I could just chalk it up to getting old. That’s what we do when we start falling down the middle aged rabbit hole. Everything is about getting old. Every pain and misstep is faulted to Father Time. I can do that with this too.

But I know the truth. This isn’t me getting old. This is just me being me. I have been doing this since I was a teenager. I can remember searching for sneakers, sunglasses, and Gin Blossoms CDs that I was positive were in my closet ten minutes ago. Suddenly, they were gone forever. I’ve lived in a lot of hungry houses.

Yup, losing things is my cheesecake murderer. I’ve stressed about it. I’ve had nightmares about it. I’ve lived with it my whole life. I’d like to think that realizing it is half the battle. Maybe knowing I have a problem with suddenly misplacing items could make me focus more on holding on to them. I just need to be conscious of where I leave things. I think I read that in a book once. I loved that book.

Man, where did I put that thing?