And I’m loading my laundry into two machines, using my customary system of “lights & darks” to decide which-goes-with-what — because I’ll be damned if I’m burning through, like, 1000 quarters to split everything into tiny loads of whites, colours, delicates, etc. I tend to only buy neutrally-inclined colours anyways: your beiges, your greys, and your off-whites, a lot of light-blues, etc.
Of course, as I’m doing that I’m scoping tonight’s scene, looking to see if my favourite laundromat characters are here:
- a handful of women who never stop working the whole time (do they ever just let the machines do the work? where do all those clothes come from anyways? where do they go?)
- the upper-middle-aged guy who just lingers, apparently in no rush to get back home to his non-life
- the kid who seems to teleport all over the premises, not really belonging to any parent in particular
- the girl who tells her trying-to-be-helpful-but-has-no-idea-what-he’s-doing boyfriend to stay out of her way and go play video games
- the relatively successful-looking dude — I imagine maybe his own washer and dryer are broken — out of his element, sitting on the wooden bench, vigorously typing something into his Blackberry as he checks out the milieu…
Hmmm, something is oddly familiar about that last guy tonight…
I don’t think much of it. I go grab a seat, pull out my MacBook and start trying to catch up on my reading. Of course, I’m also checking TweetDeck once-in-awhile, but somehow I missed this:
Bad news: dryer stopped drying. Worse: had to buy a new set (red!) Hanging at the Internet/Laundry Cafe with my wife. Quite the adventure!
But I did catch the followup:
Scene from a laundromat. This could be my fave piece of writing on a while: http://viigo.im/0dCE
I dare say it is quite entertaining. I always like Carmi’s longer posts; I wish he’d write more of them. He describes the scene it pretty well – with a photographer’s eye — far more artfully than I did:
The scene: a wooden bench at the Laundry Cafe here in London…
I must admit I’m enjoying being here. There’s a cross section of humanity that provides endless oppurtinity to observe – the middle-aged guy who played pinball until the machine went dark, the near-shaven-headed dude in cargo shorts who can’t tell the difference between whites and colors, the bored 12-year-old boy whose scowling, cornerback-esque mother dragged him here against his will, the modern-day Cheech and Chong wannabes who seem fascinated by the unique facets on a Canadian quarter coin, the sad-faced, long-haired woman using the payphone who doesn’t seem to have smiled in years, who wears a windbreaker on a warm, humid night and who wears a weight on her shoulders that can’t be seen, but can be clearly felt.
This is quite honestly the funniest — and coolest — thing to happen to me in a while. I did have some trouble deciding whether (or rather, how) to introduce myself.
In the end I slipped out like a blogger in the night, running home with my box of laundry — a lot cleaner, a little more same-coloured than before — and my story… leaving behind Cheech & Chong, and Carmi with his wife on their mundane adventure — and the most gigantic pile of clothes I’ve ever seen!
