'I Know It's Here Somewhere...' Man Searches Junk Drawer For Second Junk Drawer

PHOENIX, AZ—After discovering this week that the generally accepted “junk” drawer in his home’s kitchen had a broken handle, local pool supplies store proprietor Evan Preston, 38, searched the junk drawer to see if it contained a second junk drawer.

“My first thought when the handle came off the junk drawer was, is there a junk drawer in the junk drawer?” Preston said while pawing through it. “I think I remember seeing one. There’s so much stuff in here. I could go to the store to buy one or get stuff to fix this one, but if we have a good one in the bad one…”

Preston’s wife Sam, however, speculated that while Preston might be accurately remembering the presence of a junk drawer within the junk drawer, the junk drawer he is hoping to find might actually be the drawer in which he's already looking.

“All I’m saying is that the junk drawer that is broken may have come out of the junk drawer we had before that, and that’s what Evan is really thinking of. In other words, there was a junk drawer in the old junk drawer, but that junk drawer is this broken junk drawer,” said Sam, while watching her husband over his shoulder. “Wait! Is that a junk drawer there in the back of this junk drawer? Oh… no. That's sixty packets of soy sauce. Darn. Sorry, hon. Check the junk-drawer drawer.”

Following the near-miss, Preston’s search of the impossibly-packed junk drawer continued until the late evening. But when reached for comment, his son John revealed that the search may not be futile.

“Oh man, I can’t believe they don’t remember this. When we went antiquing up north that one time, Mom bought these old junk drawers we didn’t need, so one went in the junk drawer we had at the time—you know what, hold on,” John said before rolling in a free-standing chalkboard and clearing a space on which he began furiously sketching a flow chart. “Basically, think of the broken junk drawer dad is looking in right now as Junk Drawer A, or Junk Drawer^1. As mom hypothesized, it’s actually what we would call Junk Drawer^0 or Junk Drawer Prime."

“But what even Mom doesn’t realize, as you can surmise from my designation of those two junk drawers as 'Chain Alpha,' is the implied existence of Junk Drawer 'Chain Beta'—or generations 1 through 3. Am I losing you?” asked John, circling a cluster of several squares near the bottom of the chalkboard. “In essence, we have one junk drawer within a junk drawer in the kitchen, but in the garage, we also have a junk drawer within a junk drawer within a junk drawer, all of which we have lost contact with but which do remain in theoretical existence. Think of a black hole that contains a black hole...”

Dr. Leopold Heidelberg, 67, a professor of applied physics at Arizona State University, acknowledged that while junk drawer string theory remains in its infancy, a thrice-removed junk drawer is not as far fetched as it seems.

“As I hypothesized in my doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago, an infinite chain of junk drawers, each containing an infinite number of old, dead batteries, loose tacks, faceplates for light switches, and those little salt and pepper tube packet thingies is not just a possibility, but actually a mathematical certainty,” said Dr. Heidelberg. “What is less certain is whether Mr. Preston will stop fooling around and just take the screwdriver from the tool drawer to tighten the junk drawer handle.”