Dubious Quality

I did a load of laundry and put it all in the dryer. Included were some clothes Eli 22.5 had left when he went back to school. He's not coming back, and everything has to go somewhere before the house is sold, so I looked through the piles of clothing, because we're the same size, mostly.

I picked out a few shirts and shorts, which were all nice upgrades for me, and they went into the laundry, too. 

Like I said, I put it all in the dryer. I forget about it, as I do, and came back down two hours later. I opened up the dryer.

I couldn't understand what I was seeing. The entire dryer looked like a writhing mass of snakes, all knotted up together. It was impossible, and yet, there it was.

It took me a while to piece together the bizarre sequence of events, but eventually, I figured it out. A pair of shorts with an endless drawstring (not cut into individual lengths) somehow wrapped itself around the very edge of the lint filter. Then, every time the dryer turned, it twisted the drawstring one more turn, tightening it. 

By the end of the cycle that drawstring had been turned hundreds of times. 

Somehow, other clothes were somehow captured by the drawstring and shorts, and they started tightening with every turn, too. It looked like a portal into hell, that dryer.

It took twenty minutes to unwind and separate everything. Unreal.

I made a crucial error in not documenting the scene immediately, but here's a picture of the sleeve of a sweatshirt that was trapped and infinitely knotted up:

I realized what the omens were for when I checked the weather forecast today. 12-18 inches of snow forecast from noon tomorrow to noon Sunday.

That portal into hell isn't looking so bad right now.