May Day!
What does that celebrate, you may ask? Hell, don’t ask me, I don’t have any idea. All I know is that people in England are rioting today. Over what, I have no idea. I think it has something to do with white officers killing an unarmed black suspect…er…no, wait, that’s here.
Anyway, it’s some holiday or another. A good excuse for Yellow Rat Bastard to do laundry. For me, it’s about the fact that Kwipette and I are running out of clothes. For YRB, it’s about…well, who the hell knows, cleanliness may be next to godliness, but it’s a far cry from Yellow Rat Bastardness…for all I know, he chose today just to drive me further insane (his justification for many, many of his decisions).
After a brisk day of work (Warlokk sent me a link to a Genesis simulator and all the ROMs you could ever want), I proceed over to the Bastard’s palatial quarters, where I knock at his door.
And wait.
And knock some more.
And wait some more.
And pound a LOT.
And wait some more.
And open the mail slot in the door and begin screaming obscenities through it.
Finally, there is a sign of life. Bastard staggers to the door, completely lost, trying to figure out where his coffee, cigarettes, and lighter could possibly be hiding.
“Huh?”
“Get the hell up, jerk-off, it’s time to do laundry.”
“What are you doing home so early?”
“It’s not early, it’s 6pm you lazy turd!”
“Ugh.”
And then I sit and wait while he finds his cigarettes, finds his lighter, microwaves a ‘fresh’ cup of coffee, and does his morning stretches (sits in the chair and squints against the light).
“Bleger blah blah” (or something to that effect; even wide-awake, he’s barely coherent).
“What?”
“Huh?”
“Oh, god, shut up and get your laundry together already!”
Of course, because we planned to go do laundry tonite immediately after I got off of work, he has absolutely nothing ready.
Half an hour later, he’s smoked a cigarette, drank a cup of coffee, smoked another cigarette, found his laundry, smoked another cigarette, and found the strength to face the day. While he’s doing this, I’ve played around on his computers, using his almighty DSL to find a wonderful porn site. And what’s the first thing I find? A hidden camera of two gorgeous lesbians having sex in the laundromat! Now THAT’s the sort of adventures I want to see when I go do my laundry! Is that too much to ask for?
Needless to say, we are now both ready to go to the laundromat, eager to face the gorgeous lesbians that we just KNOW are going to be waiting there for us.
We climb into the car. Bastard lights a cigarette. Which is a sure sign he’s about to start bitching.
“Don’t even start bitching.”
“What? I’m not gonna bitch.”
“Good.”
“I didn’t even say anything.”
“Keep it that way.”
Deep inhale of his cigarette.
“But if I was going to bitch, I’d bitch about why the hell we have to drive 800 miles to use a laundromat when there’s a perfectly serviceable one only one block away.”
“I told you not to start bitching!”
“Who’s bitching? I’m merely examining possibilities…like how I could possibly be bitching about us driving 800 miles to the laundromat when there’s a great one only one block away.”
“That is not a ‘great one.’ That friggin’ place is crowded as hell, and if someone is taking too long with one of the dryers, you start cursing them out loudly and embarrass the hell out of me acting like an asshole.”
“Hey man, she was an asshole! She deserved it, taking so long to fold her clothes!”
“You didn’t need to tell her she was an asshole!”
“Oh yes I did. How else would she have known she was being an asshole? I exist to correct the shortcomings in others. She was making me wait; now she will know the error of her ways and not take so long.”
“Oh, yeah, can’t make you wait, cause you have SO MUCH to do. What did you do after you finished your laundry that time, anyway? You went home and went to sleep, didn’t you?”
“Exactly! And I could have gotten at LEAST 15 more minutes of sleep in had she not taken so long!”
“Why are you still talking?”
“Why are we going THIS way? What, do we have to take EVERY back road between here and there?”
“Shut the hell up, hippy! You know why we’re going this way? Because I’M DRIVING. If you had a car, which you don’t, and were able to drive without flipping the car over five times, which you aren’t, I might consider letting you drive.”
“It was only three times.”
“Whatever. Point is, I’m driving, so shut the hell up.”
“Point is, this road goes on forever! Look at it! It stretches out to infinity!”
“Blah, blah, blah; stop with the melodramatics already, princess.”
Thankfully, we have finally arrived at the laundromat. As Bastard has so diligently pointed out, it is much further away than our local laundromat. However, the local laundry has 1.5 chairs, about 2 washers, and -1 dryer (negative because the ones they do have work so shitty that they have to count as a negative number). Worse, it is always crowded – and if there’s one thing I hate more than a shitty laundromat, it’s a shitty laundromat full of people. Especially when, as today, I have to put up with the Yellow Rat Bastard and I am without any explosives, firearms, or really pointy sticks.
“Can I use some detergent?”
“What? No! Get the hell away from me!” The Bastard has sidled up close and is watching me sort my clothes, the whole time eyeballing my detergent.
“Oooooh – Cheer! I bet that’s a good detergent! I bet it makes your clothes smell nice and fresh.”
It is by totally ignoring any bitching that I do, yet totally outraged if I don’t bow and kipper to every nuance of bitchdom that he does, that the Yellow Rat Bastard is working to drive me insane. Normal people would get the hint when you tell them things like “I barely have enough detergent for my laundry” or “I only brought so much” or “Why didn’t you bring your own?” or “If you ask me one more friggin’ time to borrow detergent, I’m going to kick your teeth in.” But the Bastard is completely unaffected by any sort of “norms” or “rules” or “polite behavior,” so he has already emptied half of my detergent bottle into his half-load of laundry while I’m still on mid-curse.
Do you see why I hate him?
The worse thing about this laundromat is the decided absence of hot lesbians making sweet love. I looked in all the dryers, washing machines, and the bathroom – all empty. No hot lesbians, no making sweet love, not even a hidden camera with which to observe future liaisons between any that do arrive. Overall, pretty depressing.
But it’s still precious, precious time to myself. The Bastard has sprung for TWO quarters for the dryer, so his clothes won’t actually be dripping wet when he stuffs them into his laundry bag this time. Now, however, the amusement of watching his neon-green shirt spin around in the dryer has faded, so he’s off to find more entertainment by falling asleep in the front seat of the car.
Enter the Screaming Ninnies.
I love kids. I really do. Especially when they’re cute, clean, and well-behaved. And let me state for the record that I am full and well aware that I have just cursed myself to have ugly, dirty, obnoxious little hellions. So. Into the Bastard’s and mine little night of quiet reflection and loathing at the laundry comes the Screaming Ninnies.
It is a couple and three children. There is a daughter, probably about three years old, and two twin boys, about four years old. The twins, whom I shall call Noise and Fury, enter the laundromat with this battle cry:
“Aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
It is a screech whose levels of annoyance can only be reproduced by dropping a kitten on a slanted chalkboard.
You would think that the children would get tired, bored, have to inhale, or just be struck down by God for being insufferable little bastards. Then again, had God been so inclined to take such action on the basis of annoyance, we would no doubt never have propagated as a species. However, the children continue on and on, and now add a new twist: they’re running around and around and around and…
My last shred of sanity snaps quietly in the laundromat.
“Hey guys, want to see something cool?”
I have their undivided attention. The parents, completely oblivious to what is in store for their spawn, pay us no heed, as they’re completely involved in the important task of reading the “Car & Auto” some other worthless piece of shit was kind enough to leave behind.
“Have you guys ever heard of the Laundry Troll?”
They grin innocently up at me, one of them digging in his nostril for some unknown reward.
“The Laundry Troll is a ferocious monster! He is a dirty, smelly creature, and he comes to laundromats to look for children to gobble up!”
Now they look uncertain…Well, one of them does, the other’s still hard at work at the booger refinery.
“He comes into the laundromats, and he has a bunch of fabric softener sheets sticking to him to cover up his ugly warts and to try and make him smell like a person – but he’s a ferocious monster!”
“Nuh-uh, you’re making this up mister!”
“What? Children, you think I’m lying to you? You just wait and see! If you misbehave in here, the Laundry Troll’s going to come, fabric softener sheets and all, and gobble you up!”
“Nuh-uh!”
I spread my hands and adopt a sorrowful look on my face. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Noise and Fury run off to begin amusing themselves by pounding their heads into the sides of washing machines. I’ve had days like that myself.
My dryers finish their cycles, I take the time to neatly fold my clothes and pack them up in my laundry bags. Moving quietly, I sneak out to the car and softly open the doors. Being as silent and ninja-esque as I could, I took the fabric softeners that I had carefully collected, and rubbed them against my hair. This had the effect of building up a slight static cling charge, for those of you wondering what I was up to. Then I carefully draped them over the slumbering Bastard. Can you see what comes next?
Through the window, I see the demon children still running round and round the machines, and their vigilant observation of their children (the daughter was playing with a fork and an electrical outlet).
“Hey man, you left some clothes in the dryer.”
“Hrmpph blah blah.”
“No, I think I saw your favorite green shirt still sitting in there.”
As I’ve mentioned before, Bastard is never close to being up to speed when he first wakes up. So, as was destined, he struggles out of the car, covered in fabric softeners, and makes his way into the laundromat.
The children’s shrieks rend the air. I smile, start the car, and drive happily away.
I love the laundromat.
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