If you happened to see me last week wearing mismatched clothes, wrinkled pants, missing one sock, and muttering to myself, there is a perfectly logical explanation:

My wife was out of town.

She and my daughter went back east for a few days to see her parents.

Now don’t misunderstand.

After all, it’s not like my wife dresses me.

Okay, she doesn’t dress me EVERY day.

No, the cause of my mismatched meanderings is a sad and heinous malady that afflicts me and approximately 148,658,898 men in the United States alone.

It is something my wife refers to as “Man Disease.”

In fact, she has often threatened to gather a bunch of her friends and hold a telethon.

Researchers have suggested that the problem may be a visual handicap.

Others claim it is a continuing deterioration of genetic hunting skills.

Whatever the cause, it is marked by a man’s consistent inability to find anything his wife has put away.

Let me give you an example.

My wife will go to the grocery store and come home with my very favorite sugar-free cookies.

She will then hide them in one of the 731 cabinets in her kitchen, obscured by absolutely useless staples like bags of flour, cans of black olives, and boxes of Rice-A-Roni.

Yes, I said “her” kitchen, not out of some sexist insistence that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, but because I’m usually not allowed anywhere in the vicinity of her clearly delineated domain.

On those rare occasions when I sneak into her world and start looking for something that is hidden better than an ancient document in a Nicholas Cage movie, she usually comes along, opens a secret door, moves three items, and says “there!” in that irritated voice which is unique only to female spouses who have been married longer than 17 minutes.

It’s the same in our bedroom closet.

“Honey, I’m wearing my dark blue pants today, and I can’t find my orange shirt.”

Most men who have never been married are completely unaware that you can actually hear the sound of a woman rolling her eyes three rooms away.

It takes her two seconds to find the shirt, then 20 minutes to explain all the reasons why she is absolutely not going to allow me to wear it in public.

(I’ve often thought she could have saved both of us a lot of time if she’d simply yelled “No!” from the other room, much like the owner of a new puppy who just ran out of old newspapers.)

While most women are very good at finding things, my wife is almost superhuman.

I’ve actually called her at work and interrupted an important conference when I can’t find my shoes or car keys, only to have her explain in less than three moves precisely where I left them.

It often reminds me of the Steven Wright bit where he calls the operator on the phone and asks “Information? Do you know where my socks are?”, only to have the stranger on the other end of the line answer “they’re behind the sofa.”

Like the kitchen, I have a legitimate excuse for not knowing where any of my garments are.

I’m not allowed to even know where the washer and dryer are located in my house.

I’ve been told that it has something to do with an unfortunate instance that resulted in a whole dresser drawer full of pink men’s underwear a few years back.

My argument was that I don’t discriminate based on color, and that a t-shirt is a t-shirt.

Apparently, in spite of the progress we’ve made in race relations and communist fear mongering in this country, whites still don’t get along with reds in a laundry setting.

Fortunately, my wife is back this week.

In spite of my shortcomings, which is another way of admitting that I have a Y chromosome, she loves, cherishes, and endures me.

It’s a love based on the time-honored tradition of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

If she doesn’t ask about the new blue tint in my previously-tan khakis, I won’t tell.