Laundromats of America

Perhaps I’ll develop a go fund me for a book. 

This comes to mind as I think about my wise elder’s friend who is visiting her this week, a woman who is on her second book, I assume about travel, her first was, and she did well with it, and I consider that since I’m heading off for a wandering life on the road, a travel book might happen.

And as I whittle down to just a few things to wear, which really is quite easy, because when it comes down to it, there’s really just a few things I wear anyway, I consider that there is a very definite milestone associated with this life change, and that is that I’m going to have to go back to doing my laundry in a laundromat.

Life in Hell.

That’s what I considered doing laundry way back when, back when I lived in a place without a washer and dryer, and to make matters worse, with a fisherman, and I fished, too, and our clothes smelled like old fish slime during the season, so weekly laundry was a must, and after Jr. moved in, laundry for three, at the laundromat.

I so loathed the laundromat. Not the task, the place.

I don’t mind doing laundry, not at all. Granted, I use a dryer, I don’t schlep it out and hang it up, and when I live on the road I will definitely be laundering undies in the sink and hanging them up, because even if I do a go fund me and get a book funded I’m sure as hell not doing laundry any more often that once a month, maybe a couple of times a year.

I can keep my Sunday go to meetin’ clothes clean enough. The others, eh, the squirrels don’t mind a little dirt.
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Back when I used to schlepp the fish stink laundry to the laundromat at least once a week, I made a vow to myself, that as soon as I had a decent job and a space of my own, that space would include a washer and dryer. Every space I’ve ever occupied since has included a washer and dryer. The space I’m in now is awesome, the dryer natural gas, it works really efficiently. 

Somewhere along the line, my “Jeff and Akbar’s Laundrohut, Not All That Depressing” Life in Hell magnet got left behind, I think I see it in my mind’s eye on the upper half of that stackable I had in Tempe. The guy who bought that house wanted for certain things to stay behind, and I’m thinking that was one of them. 
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He’d done his time in the laundromat, too.

I’m wondering if my perspective of life in Laundromats of America will have changed over the years. I wonder if they’re vastly different in, oh, say, Ohio, than they are in Oklahoma or Florida. I have visited a couple in OK, to wash the bedspreads, and my impression is that they have not.
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We shall see.