Sleep On It 8


Wrinkled Sheets - The Out Of My Mind Blog

Oops. Thanks to an error by you-know-who, the May 10th subscriber email contained the wrong link. If you wound up here expecting to read a story about the post office THIS IS THE CORRECT LINK.

 

The other day, my wife and I returned from a midnight screening at an art film movie theater. I looked at her standing in the bedroom, moonlight streaming in through the window and dancing off her hair, and I had only one thought.

“Who’d think a digitally restored version of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal would make me horny?” I said.

“Uh, huh,” she said. It was a romantic uh huh. When you’ve been married for over 25 years you know these things. In no time, I was out of my clothes and into a bottle of mouthwash.

I finished just in time to hear her moan. It was the kind of moan that could deflate more than a grown man’s ego. When you’ve been married for over 25 years you know that, too.

Clearly, something had broken the evening’s romantic mood. As a husband, it was my duty to restore it.

“Didn’t Max von Sydow have great hands? I mean, when he grabbed a pawn didn’t it give you shivers?”

“The sheets are all wrinkled,” my wife said, standing over a now turned-down bed. (FOR THE RECORD: It is important to note here that she was fully clothed.)

She smiled. It was not a romantic smile.

My wife cannot get into a bed with a wrinkled sheet. And by “a wrinkled” I mean “a wrinkle.”

Making the bed in the morning now takes me 10 minutes, including five and a half to smooth out the sheets and another three to insure the edge of the bedspread is absolutely parallel to the floor. Somewhere in the distant past, my mother-in-law must have told my wife to always be prepared for a surprise visit from Martha Stewart.

Or Euclid.

“Oh, honey,” I said, stroking her cheek, “nobody can tell if the sheets are wrinkled when the bedspread is on.”

Logic, it turns out, inflames my wife’s desires slightly less than the Magic Fingers found on old Motel 6 beds. And reminding her that, for all she knew, she wrinkled the sheets when she turned down the bed, clocks in as somewhat better than a cold shower.

“If it helps, see the sheets as both wrinkled and unwrinkled until you look at them. Then, their condition is a matter of probability,” I said.

I was thinking about the famous thought experiment proposed by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. Using the laws of quantum physics, Schrödinger explained how a cat locked in a box with a vial of poison could be dead and alive at the same time, until the box was opened.

“The next time you look at the sheet it might not be wrinkled.”

My wife sat down on the bed and smiled as she stripped off her blouse, wriggled out of her slacks and slowly let the straps on her bra fall away. I sat down next to her.

She stood up, opened her dresser draw and pulled on her flannel pajamas, the ones with buttons up the front. From this I concluded there was a reason quantum physicists were rarely invited to orgies.

“We’re only going to wrinkle the sheets anyway,” I said, hopefully, not wanting to waste dinner and a movie. Or the mouthwash.

Fifteen minutes later, my wife came out of the bathroom, smoothed out her side of the bed and slipped in between the sheets. That was my cue to run my hand up her thigh.

“Would you like me to come back wearing curlers and cold cream?” she said.

Two in the morning is a funny time of day. It’s a time when people are desperate enough to imagine the romantic possibilities of quantum physics. And, it’s a hell of a time for a cold shower.

 

Start your Sunday with a laugh. Read the Sunday Funnies, fresh humor from The Out Of My Mind Blog. Subscribe now and you'll never miss a post.

Photo: StockSnap via Pixabay (Rights: Public Domain)

 


Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

8 thoughts on “Sleep On It

  • Joe Neustein

    Highly enlightening, especially Einstein’s work on Cats in Space. (I was familiar, of course, with Henson’s more recent Pigs in Space — but not this.)
    Good stuff.

    • Jay Douglas Post author

      Hi Joe…

      Little known fact. In 1935, Schrödinger explained his famous thought experiment to his wife, Annemarie. He did, in fact, use a shar-pei instead of a cat. Annemarie, who as a child had been frightened by the wrinkles in time proposed by Einstein, moved into a separate bedroom and refused to return to the marital bed until Schrödinger replaced the shar-pei with a schnauzer. Schrödinger demurred, mainly because he misunderstood his wife and told her, “What’s the point? Have you ever opened a box and found the schnitzel alive?”

      Ironically, it was Einstein who helped Schrödinger win back Annemarie. In one of his lesser-known papers, “God Does Not Play Dice with the Universe and Other Short Stories,” Einstein described a thought experiment in which a cat is sent into space at the speed of light and, after many years of space travel, is never heard from again. Schrödinger seized upon the idea and later wrote a letter of thanks to Einstein, although there is some disagreement among scholars as to whether Einstein knew what the hell Schrödinger was talking about.

      Thought you’d like to know.

      –jay