I havent been to the laundromat in a couple years. But as my living situation crumbles beneath me, I suppose that it is time to get my laundry chops back in trim. I lived for a decade in a little cottage in Altadena, before moving here. I could have installed one of those stacked washer-dryer combos ... but I opted for the coin-op laundry instead. There were two good facilities nearby - one small and quiet, and the other big and a little raucous with kids running around and occasional drunken visitors and such things. I chose according to my mood, but liked them both. You dont meet glamorous people in a laundromat. Well, maybe you do in Hollywood, or Studio City, but not in the places I have chosen to live. You meet people who do not own a washer and a dryer. And unless you are within sight of a college campus, that means that your companions will be the working-class type. There will be some talk, but not much of it in a language I speak. I suppose that there are now laundromats with wifi, but you couldnt prove that by me. Ill opt for a book and a Big Gulp. The one advantage to the laundromat is that you can do all of your loads at once. And this we try to do. When you look around the place, your fellow laundry-doers will be wearing the one outfit that they do NOT need to have clean in the near future. This is the only place in the first-world where you can still occasionally see a pair of Dolphin shorts worn in a non-ironic manner. There is a coin-op here in Thousand Oaks. Ive been there a couple of times when I was trying to stay out of the front house for one reason or another. Its okay. Small-ish. Those are tricky - the small ones. It is a craft unto itself to end up with a couple of dryers open when your loads finish spinning. People will get all kinds of territorial about this stuff, trying to hold available dryers by wedging those wheeled baskets in front of them, or some such strategy. There are optimal times for this adventure. Saturday morning-afternoon is not one of them. It will all come back to me. Keep your eyes and ears open for a bit of land on somebodys property where I can move my motor-home. Somewhere in the East Valley would be primo.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 17:31:40 +0000
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