In addition to being the primary bread winner in our little family unit, my wife is also really good at interior decorating. Since being married, my living spaces have been vibrant, comfortable and fill me to the brim with pride. These spaces were also filled with an extraordinary amount of pillows.

Pillows and I have always had a love hate relationship. I respect the amount of comfort they afford me but in recent times they’ve gotten a bit showy and in certain scenarios, completely useless. Where once I saw a place to lay my head, I now see a gigantic question mark because according to my wife , the vast majority of our pillows are decorative in nature. Not that I actually want to sleep with one of them supporting my oversized head. They’re covered in tassels, beads and other skin irritating pieces of flare, the type of stuff you see attached to movie costumes and the bras of belly dancers. I made the mistake (drunkenly of course) of sleeping with one only to discover that in addition to my hangover, I had the pock marked face of an acne suffering teenager.

Finding sleep worthy pillows in my house is about as easy as finding a room that’s not covered in cat hair. There are plenty of tiny couch pillows with the aforementioned irritation nodules, the gigantic but uncomfortably ridged “background” pillows that help prop up our bed’s “foreground” pillows, which themselves look comfortable but have the flexibility of a piece of cardboard. We have a total of six “soft and freshers”, but two are reserved for guests and the other 3 are split between my wife and the cats. This leaves me with the flaccid dick of the bunch, a deflated shadow of a pillow that’s had a good but hard life and requires me to fold it in half in order to extract any sort of comfort from it’s hollow form.

In the beginning, I thought I had a say in the amount of pillows we had but that wasn’t really the case. Once I became the main domestic manager, I again attempted to lobby for less pillows but got shot down rather quickly as well. This meant that the only way to truly decrease the amount of pillows that exist in our house, I’d have to take drastic measures, things that I wouldn’t be proud of and would tearfully admit to my wife on my deathbed.

The first idea was to just hide the pillows, but my wife is far too clever for such a tactic. I then thought about giving them away one by one in hopes she wouldn’t notice, but they came in pairs and I figured she’d catch on to this as well. What I needed to do was plant a seed in her mind that would eventually grow into a tree of doubt as to whether or not an ocean of pillows was appropriate for our home. In order for this to work, I’d have to turn to a group that was effective at this sort of thing yet not entirely trustworthy. I’d have to turn to my cats.

I first realized their aptitude for ruining things when they orchestrated Operation “Pee On Shag Carpet”, a covert mission that succeeded in making my wife realize that shag anything wasn’t a good idea. After that, they began working on Operation “Make White Stuff Look Gross” and Operation “We Don’t Like That Brand of Food”. I figured they were the best, even if their methods weren’t exactly on my preferred side of the morality spectrum. I soon found out, however that these cats had a secret alliance with the pillows and turned my plans against my in a very horrifying way.

I thought my window would occur during round two of Operation “We Don’t Like That Brand of Food” (codenamed German Canned Food), as a change in their diet resulted in one of them carpet bombing everything with diarrhea. It just so happened that the decorative pillows happened to get knocked to the floor during my usual cleaning and I just so happened to not notice in hopes of that my cat’s anus of mass destruction would find its mark. While my first mistake was not realizing the alliance that had been established beforehand, the second and ultimately more devastating mistake was leaving 3/4’s of my pants on the ground as well. To make a long story short, the pillows stayed clean and I had a couple pairs of poopy pants that I had no hand in (not that me personally pooping in my own pants would have made things better).

Perhaps I learned a valuable lesson about clandestine wars , but my stance on pillows remains the same. I just want a world where children of all religions, races and nationalities can live in homes where pillow related questions revolve around which pillow is the softest and not which pillow are they allowed to use. If things continue to progress in this way, we may see the end of “soft and freshers” and the beginning of an era marked by attractive discomfort.