laundry day

I've finally completed the process of moving old blog posts into my new blog.

It's amazing how much I accomplish when I really don't want to do homework...

Today was one of those days when I wasn't out of bed until 2:00 PM. When some compelling reason exists, I can get up. No problem. Otherwise, I'll sleep forever.

I said hello to D and L as they cleaned house.

Then I had another burrito breakfast, and listened to the 1969 Boulez version of The Rite of Spring. I could hear the King Crimson connection in the rhythm and the harmony. "Hey, what would it be like if our rock band played stuff like this?"

And then it was laundry time. I loaded up my internal frame backpack and headed out.

DW from from class gave me a call to see about getting together again to study, but now my Wednesdays are booked. And my Mondays are booked with Tuning the Air. And then we obviously both have class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I think I'm as booked up right now as I can get without also having a job.

My laundry run was fast and efficient this time. Last time, one of my washers didn't spin, so the laundry lady on duty ran it for free through another cycle on another machine, but it ate up a lot of time.

But today was fast.

And there were some interesting characters.

I watched a stooped, disheveled old man meticulously load his immaculately folded and stacked dirty laundry into a washing machine one item at a time, in layers, with a dusting of detergent between each layer. Then he wiped down the top of the machine with an alcohol wipe, which he then folded perfectly and placed on top a stack of similarly folded used wipes. These then went into a folded plastic bag and back into his jacket pocket.

Another rail-thin, balding man, maybe in his late 40s, carried his laundry into the laundromat inside a cardboard box. While I read a book and waited for my laundry to dry, I noticed a pair of yellow latex gloves peaking over the top of the box sitting on the raised counter separating the back-to-back rows of washing machines. Whenever this man had to touch any surface in the laundromat--the handle on a laundry cart, the edge of a drier door--he would go to the box and carefully slip his hand into the yellow gloves, only the hand that would be coming into contact with a surface. And he did it just so, in just such a way that he avoided touching the outside of the gloves.

Then he would go do whatever he had to do--move the cart, open the drier--and come back. And then he would gingerly slip his hand back out of the glove so that the glove was hanging on the edge of the box, ready for its next use.

In the meantime, I read Whitley Strieber's The Path, about the Tarot of Marseilles and its connection to esoteric work. It's funny how Mr. G's ideas seem to pop up everywhere.

JVB's chapter in Archetypes for Writers detailing the Character Facts/nosanthros exercise confuses me. It's one of those things I'm going to have to re-read several times. Some of the things she says imply that you must have (a) noticed something a person/character does, and (b) asked yourself, "Why do they do that?"

But she doesn't explicitly say this is how you should approach it, so her critiques of her students are a bit baffling to me right now.

If this is indeed how you are supposed to approach the exercise, it makes a sort of sense, but I'm not sure yet. I'll go visit her website and see if I can find any clarification.

In either case, I'll try the exercise tonight and see what I get. I'm just a little hung up on the notion of getting it right. I have a hunch the point of the exercise, at least in part, is to get the writer asking these questions, but I don't understand why this point is not clear.

Last night, I heard voices in the bathroom and some banging around, maybe close to midnight. A voice said, "Be careful, dammit! You'll get that stuff everywhere!"

Shortly afterward, I went to fill up my Brita pitcher, and I heard a man groaning through the closed bathroom door (which has "THIS BATHROOM IS FOR TENENTS[sic] ONLY!!" scrawled on the outside in permanent marker). Later, back in my room and on the edge of sleep, I heard this person exit the bathroom and I thought I heard the sounds of the mop bucket being pulled out and used.

I'm pretty sure it was N I heard in there. N is slowly dying of brain cancer and uses a walker to get around, so I had this horrifying scenario in my head of N losing bowel and bladder control, coating the bathroom, and then having to feebly drag out the mop to clean the place up.

I didn't want to look. I didn't want to know.

But, today I found a clean bathroom and a Heineken mini-keg sitting in the trash can. There was a slight whiff of rancid beer, but I'll take that any day over what I had envisioned and feared was going on.

Our female tenant stricken with mental illness has been quiet today.

Right now, I'm in Trabant coffeeshop, once again avoiding homework and succeeding. A folkie female duo from Idaho and a male folk singer from California just finished performing. They were all very good performers, but folkie stuff isn't my bag these days, and I have already forgotten their names.

So make sure you go see them, whoever they were...