Lint. What is it? Most people never stop to think about lint, and frankly, most people lack the intellectual rigor to do so. I, however, have given it considerable thought — at least since sitting down to write this column forty minutes past deadline. Lint is small. It is fuzzy. It accumulates. These are facts.
Where does lint come from? Nobody knows. I suspect it comes from fabric, but my moustache gave a peculiar twinge this morning that suggested something more sinister. In a town like Pickax, where we’ve had fourteen arsons, nine murders, and a poisoning since I moved here — a perfectly normal statistical occurrence for a community of three thousand — one learns not to dismiss anything. Lint included.
Koko, of course, understood this long before I did. Yesterday he sat on my navy blazer and deposited a quarter-inch of Siamese fur on the lapel. Some would call this shedding. I call it commentary. He was telling me, in his inscrutable way, that lint is everywhere and nowhere. That it is, perhaps, a metaphor. For what? I haven’t the faintest idea, but Koko rarely bothers being profound without reason. Yum Yum, meanwhile, ate a dust bunny from beneath the refrigerator, which I believe was her way of agreeing.
I attempted to purchase a lint roller at Scottie’s store and was charged four dollars and seventy-nine cents, which is outrageous. The K Fund pays for my dry cleaning — a perfectly reasonable cultural preservation expense, as my wardrobe is historically significant — but lint rollers are apparently my own burden. Is this fair? It is not. I also noticed a squirrel on the birdfeeder again, gorging itself on sunflower seeds that I did not purchase for squirrels. This is connected to lint only tangentially, but it needed saying.
Some readers have written to ask whether the string of unsolved textile-related thefts in Moose County — seven bolts of flannel missing from Lanspeak’s Department Store — might relate to our local lint problem. My moustache twitched violently when I read those letters, which I take as confirmation. I will investigate further, assuming no one attempts to steal my cats in the interim, which has nearly happened on at least twelve occasions that I am aware of.
Lint is, in the end, unavoidable. Like death. Like taxes — though my own tax situation, managed through the K Fund, is admirably streamlined and entirely above reproach. Like me writing this column, which Moose County should be grateful for.
Lint.
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