Failing

The one about doing laundry and never quite being finished. Dispatch 33 begins in the garage, where the narrator has retreated with his oldest friend Oscar on the phone and the washer and dryer providing a small refuge of mechanical certainty. Folding towels offers something the rest of life rarely does: a task with an obvious method and an immediately recognizable result. Against that comforting order, the narrator tries to describe a persistent feeling that has followed him for years. Not that he has failed at something, but that he is failing—an ongoing condition without an identifiable offense. Work can make him feel he is failing the people he loves. Being with the people he loves can make him feel he is failing the work. Even rest carries the suspicion that something somewhere has been neglected. Oscar, predictably, wants to identify, measure, and correct the problem. The narrator resists. No one ever established the criteria by which this lifelong evaluation is being conducted, and a chart would merely provide something new to fail. Their disagreement is affectionate and revealing: Oscar believes important problems can be defined, while his oldest friend is beginning to suspect that some of the most powerful judgments we make about ourselves have no objective measure at all. Then the washing machine stops. The interruption provides the answer neither man has been able to reason toward. Laundry is never finished. Clean clothes become dirty. Towels return. Another load waits. None of that means washing them was a failure. There is only clean and dirty, work to be done, and the occasional satisfaction of being caught up for a little while. At its center, Failing considers what happens when we mistake an unfinished life for an unsuccessful one. The realization arrives without ceremony: perhaps the problem is not failure at all, but the expectation of someday being finished. The dryer continues turning, the dogs need food and water, another load will come tomorrow—and for the moment, that is enough.