I Know I Should Be Relieved But I'm Also A Tiny Bit Disappointed*

Goddamn laundromat!

I keep thinking I'm being fanciful and imagining it's a weird place because I always seem to end up writing these things in there but I've started realising that writing blog posts is a form of laundromat self-defence, as if I think nothing is going to happen to me if I'm writing.
Or if it does at least I'll have a witness.
Even if that witness is also me.
And I'm the only one who can read the handwriting in my notebook.
And if anyone read the other things written around my 'witness statement' they wouldn't consider me a reliable witness.
This is probably fundamental to the nature of all laundromats everywhere and yet I continue to be startled. All I want is clean socks.

I do have other options. I could buy a new washing machine (Ha! Ha! It is to laugh!), I could take my laundry home with me when I visit my family (but oh God that just seems... no), so I go down to the laundromat and what do I get?
Impromptu, unasked for Mythbusters!

Yes, you can temporarily fix a dodgy Cycle Select knob with a hair-tie after you've already put your laundry and washing liquid into the machine and are too stubborn to move the gooey unweildy mess.
-- CONFIRMED! --

No, you can't make a change machine accept a $20 note just by cussing it out like a fluffy duck mother lover.
-- BUSTED! --

Yes, dryer-fresh sheets are still the best thing on Earth to wrap around yourself right after the cycle finishes.
-- CONFIRMED! --

No, a lighter will not explode or catch fire if put in a dryer with a heavy weave cotton blanket on the highest setting for over half an hour.
-- BUSTED! --

This damn dryer had already yielded a bumper crop of crud (a bottle cap, a can tab, a cigarette filter, the plastic wrap from around at least three packets of cigarettes and a wad of gum wrapped in its own paper) but it wasn't until the blanket reached the end of its cycle that I found the three-quarters full piping hot cigarette lighter.

The plastic was almost malleable, the damn thing was radiating heat but no it had not burst into flames, melted or smeared my comfy cosy binky with toxic stinky fuel.

Well done anonymous lighter company whose product I was too busy throwing into a bin far far away from me to identify by name.

To blazes with you ridiculous bogan bastard whose pockets spilled this cornucopia of shash into Dryer Number 3.

I hope you miss that lighter! I hope you miss it like hell!


*I mean I'm not saying I WANTED the dryer to burst into flames but... would've looked cool.
S'all I'm saying
S'not my dryer...

Spin Cycle

I'm down at the local laundromat hoping that no one notices that I'm not wearing a bra. What with one thing and another I completely ran out by the time I made it down here.

There's a shaggy-haired man with a gold ring on each finger of his right hand which is so distracting that you almost completely miss his atrophied left hand, folded delicately back against the wrist. He hauls his clothes out of the drier, whistling and hoicks the washing basket up onto his hip with an easy movement. A gold tooth glints as he smiles at me.

A gentle giant of a boy is reading Robert Rankin and sneaking furtive, bespectacled glances about himself as the small woman who must be his mother keeps up a constant muttered stream about the quality of the machines, the state of the facilities and what dinner is likely to contain.

People wander in and out.

An upper middle class couple who have fallen on hard times sip their McCappuccinos as he reads the paper and she pats her garish neon-red dye-job.

A girl returns to claim her orphaned washing and rants to anyone who will listen about whoever dared to take her things out of a machine and dump them on top of it.

My machines finish.
One of my socks has gone missing - a sacrifice to the God of communal laundry.