Grateful bed

Making a bed isn’t the most unpleasant chore in the world. That distinction would probably fall to an odious activity involving a sponge, my hands and knees, and an uncomfortably close proximity to the toilet bowl; it’s always a firm reminder that, no matter how we dress ourselves or assume airs of dignity, we’re still stupendously gross.

So if it came down to a choice of how I wanted to spend my afternoon – making the bed or cleaning the bathroom – bed-making wins every time. Unlike a bathroom’s stark assertion of reality, a bed (if done right) is a pillowy, sweet-smelling fantasyland, helping us forget that, a few thousand years ago, the closest you’d come to a Sealy mattress was a bale of hay that smelled like goats.

Advances in bed technology notwithstanding, society is still overdue for a robot that’ll put sheets on the stupid thing – because of all the chores that exist, from dusting the bookcase to polishing that bronze replica of William Shatner’s original toupee, making a bed from scratch takes way more time than it ought to. A guy working alone to make a queen-sized bed is like someone who’s color blind trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube. It can be done, but only with perseverance, and maybe a handle of bourbon for the headaches.

Now when I say “making the bed,” I’m talking about just after a wash, when you have to re-layer it from the ground up with various sheets and comforters and whatnot. Everyday bed-making, the kind you do in the morning when you get up, is no big deal – especially if you’re a person like me who’s decided to just not do it. If I lived at the zoo, and my bed was in the middle of that faux jungle where the tigers live, then yeah, for the public’s sake, I’d probably make my bed (all the while wondering why the hell I live at the zoo). But my bedroom doesn’t typically draw that kind of an audience, and so I decided long ago that I would merely leave the sheets as-is in the morning. That’s one of those moves you make when you’re a bachelor and want to save some time. It’s the same reasoning that explains why I walk around with the kind of three-day beard growth that makes me look like a Sherpa guiding mountain climbers to base camp.

When you do a wash, though, you’re faced with the inevitable. Carrying a fresh load back to the bedroom embodies such a stark dichotomy of emotion: On the one hand, there is perhaps no smell more heavenly, no bundle more pleasantly warm and inviting, than a pile of freshly-washed bedsheets. On the other hand, knowledge of the impending fiasco transforms the walk back from the dryer into a kind of death march, laden with concerns over how to get the corners just right, and how sheet-wrinkles are the great unspoken scourge of humankind. If only we could sequester that glorious odor from the chore it foreshadows. One of these days I’ll open a business where people can just come in and smell dryer-fresh sheets for five bucks a sniff, then be on their merry ways.

Again, this is mainly a problem if you’re flying solo. The lucky ones are the couples who do chores together; they can dress a bed in about five minutes flat, while cartoon bluebirds perched atop the bedposts sing selections from various Disney movies. It’s a simple thing when there are two. One person grabs one end, one grabs the other, and the next thing you know the deed is done and they’re sacked out on the couch watching “Storage Wars.”

Meanwhile, I’m crouched over my mattress like a feral wolverine, trying desperately to keep the corners of my fitted sheet from popping up. The problem with fitted sheets in particular is that you can never differentiate between the long and the short sides; in a perfect world, the corners of the sheet would be color-coded, with giant arrows pointing the way, and large text that reads, “This part goes under the upper-left-hand corner of the mattress, dufus.” As much as it might sting to be called a dufus by my bedsheets, it would be worth it to avoid what’s currently inevitable: Tucking the wrong corner under the wrong part of the mattress, and then watching it pop back up and curl in on itself about halfway through the ordeal. It’s enough to make a guy go back to goaty hay bales.

And of course, with my severely limited skills in this department, the uppermost sheets are just a smoldering train wreck. Uneven, lumpy; there are oatmeal cookies that have smoother surfaces than my bed on laundry day.

It’s because of hapless dopes like me that they need to invent a bed-making robot, and believe me, I’m the first to complain about the overabundance of gadgets and thingamabobs. Most are unnecessary, like smartphones with apps that show you the proper way to shave superhero insignias onto your dog’s buttocks. But every once in a while, these tech manufacturers get it right. We’ve seen it with those weird-looking automatic vacuuming contraptions, and beds seem like the next logical frontier.

Anything to facilitate a decent-looking setup. My bed may be hidden from the world for now, but it seems wise to plan for the contingency that I do somehow end up in the tiger cage.

Hey, it could happen.