20. Filthy, but wearable.

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Note to myself for future reference:

When in thrall to the Holiday Stress Gods, split the immense amount of laundry you have into two slightly-less-mammoth batches, and tell yourself that you have plenty of towels and sheets and blankets, and that the dirty ones don't need to be cleaned until next year. Take only the clothes, and clean them.

I spent Thursday and Friday nights fretting and procrastinating on the damned laundry, and it's something I've been trying to break myself of for the last few years. Years. I do this - I leave laundry for a couple weeks beyond when I originally wished to knock those suckers out. I get creative with my more-hated clothes in the closet, and my trusty bottle of Woolite and a drying rack propped in the bathtub overnight. Sometimes, in desperate times, I leave a box fan to blow on the clothes so that I can wear them the next morning. My laundromat denial knows no bounds.

But, you know, chores need to be done, writing needs to happen, and after spending several mind-numbing hours at a desk job listening to a ringing phone, my brain tends to shut down and I need an hour or so of drooling slack-jawed nothingness in the peace and quiet of my home before I feel ready to take on yet another couple of mind-numbing hours watching the clothes tumble dry with a fresh mountain new car hypoallergenic clean froofy triple color-safe scent.

Friday night I broke - I started feeling depressed (over dirty socks - where are my priorities, people? I used to get sad over more important things, like the fact that they were cancelling Max Headroom. Lowering standards on stress, since 1973, that's me), and I ended up forcing myself to bed early, to combat all this blither-blather over two monstrous green duffel bags with some honest rest.

It worked. I woke up before the alarm, I gathered up the duffel bags, my momentum, a coupla twenties, and some detergent, and zipped on over to the huge, brightly-painted 24 hour place. I was out of the house and out into the world by 8 am, on a Saturday.

I loathe Saturdays in the larger world, and I have for some time, so this was quite an accomplishment. Fortunately plenty of other people at the very least loathe Saturday mornings, and so I was blessed with empty machines, a choice of carts whose wheels did not skedaddle in a most spastic fashion, and a bunch of top-row dryers that were not broken. Score!

So uneventful was the rest of this dull exercise that I'll leave it there, except to say that I thought I saw a woman doing laundry there who used to be in a couple of local bands, and that I completely chickened out from saying hello and letting her know that I thought she was a groovy musician. It seems a bit useless, perhaps, to play Memory Lane with someone as they're measuring capfuls of soda powder and softener into the Triple Super Front-Loader, hoping that they won't notice the bright blue "Grumpy" nightshirt I inherited and haven't gotten enough gumption up to get rid of just yet, solely because it is bright blue, and sports a large Disney iron-on of Grumpy the dwarf, sitting on my folding table with my teetering piles of basic black. Did that last sentence make any sense? Do you people who have laundry in your own homes know what you're missing out on? I think not.

Leftover quarters in a change purse seem like a fine weapon in a pinch. Those suckers are heavy!

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