There are days when things seem to be going too well, when I am content and at peace with all around me. I wake up without any aches and pains, and my ancient grain muesli tastes amazing because I have calculated the right balance of milk, hand dried sultanas, protein enriched, low fat yoghurt and wild bee honey. The private school kid next door isn’t whinging about his piano tutorial and extended maths session, and the wife doesn’t complain about how I’ve hung out the washing or asks if the dog has done a wee. Life is good.
Then, as if the entitled Eastern Suburbs gods are telling me I do not deserve my serenity, something far more sinister stirs in my bedroom wardrobe upstairs and raises its metallic head: a feral tangle of wire coat hangers.
All it takes is an innocent slide of the wardrobe door and there lurking between the white and blue business shits and a casually hanging, superbly pressed chino or two, is an offending knot of thin, twisted metal. You see, dear readers, I am not a fan of wire coat hangers. Wood coat hangers all the way. In fact, I have campaigned against the metal hanger for many years. They put ugly creases and bumps in my clothes, they catch at my cashmere jumpers, and they cut and jam my fingers as I rip and tear at their non sentient existence.
I try my best to ignore them and as I reach for a shirt, one of those linen numbers that says, ‘casually spiritual, maturely Bondi, but still dresses up for dinner’, I am instead assaulted by a cascading avalanche of metallic triangles. To be honest, I am not a fan of linen shirts either. After 10 minutes on me, they look like I have slept in the bloody thing. My wife keeps insisting I own a few. Yes – (Chat GPT dash), that is how much I love her.
In fact. I’m also not a fan of jogging on the spot, aggressive, bike riding, Lance Armstrong wannabes in Centennial Park, double parking SUV’s and putting the rubbish out. Come to think of it, mowing the lawn, stacking the dishwasher and self-appointed AI police annoy me too….deep breath David.
Where’s that bloody mantra I learned during my Vedic meditation course?
Back to the coat hangers. At first, I tried logic. Reason. Negotiation. A quiet word:
‘Please, just one. One hanger. I’m not trying to unpick your family tree.’
But wire hangers are immune to reason. They resent my serenity.
And that’s when it hit me: these weren’t hangers at all.
They were unresolved, cupboard lurking, childhood traumas.
In my early years of recovery, wise old men quietly advised that ‘resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.’
And yet, here I still am, chugging venom straight from the exposed and snapped spout of a coat hanger, hoping that somehow, they would suffer while I stood shirtless, enraged, swearing in the mirror and lightly bleeding from scratches on my hands and forearms.
And then it hit me across the head, like the blow from a namaste infested pillow, the wire coat hanger is the perfect metaphor for the perfectionism I still grasp at.
They are the relics of rushed choices due to anxiety caused by the perfection horizon I will never reach. Just like the rude barista I keep going to out of guilt and convenience or the punnet of blueberries I know I should move, that are sitting right in front of the bananas, but I don’t. And of course, I knock them over. They scatter across the kitchen floor like marbles, and suddenly I am on my knees, crying $6.50 Harris Farm tears, eating berries covered in dust and crumbed, organic dog kibble, cursing my ADHD brain for its chaos and my failure to see it coming.
Our superbly coiffured Wheaten Terrier raises his head from our highly rated Jardin couch (that everyone comments on, except the dog) and he wipes his sleep encrusted eyes on the contrasting Country Road throw and yawns at me as if to say, ‘Grow up human.’
‘I should shop more at Target and ALDI and why do I spend $120 washing and cleaning that ungrateful mutt when I pay $35 to cut my greying hair at the same barber, I have been going to in Bondi Junction for 30 years!’ I mutter to our ice white; winter is coming, 5 starred coffee maker.
The coffee maker merely drips congealed, virgin sloped, Peruvian caffeine crystals sourced by the finest Byron Bay providores.
And yes — every metal triangle in my wardrobe is a tiny shrine to my flawed ego. Their tangled mess is less a design flaw, more a mirror of my emotional immaturity. Try to free one, and seven more cling to it like it is a group, tantric session at a remote, South Coast surf club. Don’t ask me why I know about those half-forgotten surf clubs….
But how do we make peace with these wiry agents of domestic chaos?
Pray? Meditate? Purge? All the above? Does time cure all wounds or do the scars pucker and still pinch?
Now, when I find a rogue hanger in the car boot, cunningly concealed in a mouldy, beach towel, hidden behind a sandy surf fin, I gently say to it, ‘Thank you for reminding me that control is an illusion.’
Crap I do!
I grab it, twist it, make an effigy to past demons and swear at the blonde haired grommet roaring by on his throttled up e-bike, as his precariously balanced surfboard grazes my dented, dusty car.
I have changed in many ways, but in others, not a lot.
