My cat Taibas Jones, AKA Nietzsche, AKA for a dark period in 2006 “Mittens,” is Notorious Sock Stealer. When I was in college, it was all about the sweet sock lovin’. Whenever SeaFed would annoy me (usually) I would tie his tube socks together and let her have her way with them.

Taibas J. fell off that habit eventually, but now she has resumed it with great gusto. It’s to the point now where she will pop into a hamper to retrieve dirty socks, so that even if the house is sparkly-clean I can bring home some guests, say some hot Mormon boys who are on their Excellent Adventure, and the living room floor will be absolutely littered with exhausted and ravaged sock-maidens.

At some point near the end of the summer, my living room floor started being littered with other people’s socks. They were nasty little man-booties, and filthy.

“Oh Jesus God,” is the appropriate response to returning home to this. Accept no substitutes.

I started putting them on the porch because I thought it was my old duplex neighbor, leaving them out on his porch lazily. But then the socks started appearing on the front lawn, closer to the guy next door’s apartment. They came in daily, and I began chucking them out the front window for lulz, as if they had nothing to do with me. “AGGGH!” Fling! I enjoy sport of this nature.

Of course this had to reach a crisis point. An unholy climax. One day I was in my house and I saw Taibas totally loving up this long soccer-looking sock. My neighbor came home, and his reaction on the sidewalk was, predictably, “OH JESUS GOD.” I peeped out the window and saw him holding the sock as if it was diseased and animatedly telling his apartment neighbors, who like my cat very much, about what he’d witnessed, and I saw them trying not to laugh.

And bam, no more dirty man booties on my living room carpet.