Blind as a Bat

I, needless to say, am blind as a bat and always wrong.

This statement is according to my wife and is backed up by the following evidence. Firstly, I can never find things that I need/want/could do with. Despite them “always” being “straight in front of my eyes”. Secondly, even when I have what I believe to be a cogent argument, backed up with evidence, witness testimony, newspaper articles devoted to my side of the story, the wikifiddlers working for me for a change, I’m just wrong. Perhaps ‘wrong’ is the wrong word. Maybe it is analogous to Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness”, whereby it is that feeling where you know something is true and factual not because of ‘facts’, but because you feel it to be true  deep inside you. And that can’t be wrong! So my wife feels that I am always “wronginess”. And that also can’t be wrong.

I refute both of these statements. I don’t know how it is in your house, but in my house, I have my shit and I know where everything is. Yes, things can be a bit messy, but I know where the stuff that I want is hiding. Of course, I am not in my house 24 hours a day, so every so often my wife “tidies up”. Now this entails (according to empirical evidence) her taking my things haphazardly and selectively and hiding them in a difference place. The next step is to forget that she has tidied, and the step after that is for her to forget that she has forgotten. So me, a week later.

 “Wife, my 5/8s torx screwdriver was on the speaker and it’s not here now, did you touch it?”

“No! I don’t know what that is and I never touch your things. Your things are so dirty and untidy! I will clean up soon and touch your things.”

“It looked like a little metal rod.”

“It must be there already! Oh you are so blind!” Huffs and puffs over to me. Wild stares. Scrabbles around the speaker. “Look! Look! There it is!”

“No, darling, that’s potato.”

“Oh.”

“Did you tidy things away?”

“No!”

So a week later I am pruning a petrified gorse bush near the decking and find my torx screwdriver. I brandish it in front of her and the insouciance is palpable. “I dunno.”