Life As Performance Art 28

The clothes are in the dryer and it is still only 6:07 in the morning. I used to do my laundry every two weeks or so, never on a fixed day or at a fixed hour. I was dependent on community laundromats and usually there was a coffee shop nearby where I could sit and wait, reading the newspaper, or a book, or writing in my journal, or writing whatever, sometimes visiting with whomever was present and wanting conversation. I would haul my clothes in a dark plastic bag, as though carrying my garbage with me. In one neighbourhood in East Van, I would go grocery shopping during the wash cycle, return to put the clothes in the dryer, take the groceries home, then return to take my clothes home. I often had poor luck with apartment laundry facilities. They were nonexistent, sometimes, or they didn't function very well. When I first moved here to Candela Place almost seventeen years ago, there were problems with the laundry machines, and I was often using the laundromat on Davie Street, but really for the last sixteen years or so, I have been exclusively, or almost exclusively, reliant on the laundry facilities in my building. At first we were armed with smart cards that had to be reloaded, often in inconveniently located stores. Following loud and strident lamentations from the tenants, our managers caved and for at least the last fourteen years, the machines have been coin-operated. At first they were a dollar a load. Now it is only seventy-five cents. Given that this is a social housing building occupied by people on low incomes, free washers and dryers would be nice, but let's be thankful for small mercies, eh? Given that there are but three machines for more than sixty tenants, the laundry facilities can get rather crowded at times. Many of our tenants are not particularly well-organized, nor are inclined to think of others, so that it is not uncommon for any one tenant to end up monopolizing all six machines (washers and dryers) I got really sick of this, complained to one of the managers and she promptly told me to get over it. This woman is from Nicaragua and has assumed that white Canadians have absolutely nothing to complain about, not even if they happen to be homeless and hungry, because they don't live in Nicaragua where it's always worse, much worse, and shouldn't we be feeling, oh so very privileged, for living in such a land of opportunity, plenty, and overflowing with milk and honey and maple syrup. This woman's husband tried to befriend me a few years ago. They are both, like many fundamentalist evangelical Christians, dreadful homophobes. When I heard her hubby wax loud and boring about the horrors of homosexuality and gay marriage, I distanced myself from both of them, concluding that if I was going to practice my Spanish, then it must be with someone not caught up in such loathsome views. By the same token, if I was married to a person of colour and trying to learn English, I would not accept help from a white-supremacist. Hell, not even if I was or not living with a person of colour, racism is horrible and completely unacceptable, and so is gay-bashing. Anyway, back to laundry. I have for many years been taking to doing my laundry in the early mornings. For a long time it was Sundays. Now it's Fridays, the first day of my three day weekends. This works well. Usually, I am the only person in the laundry room at 5 or 6 am, and then I can go back upstairs in the meantime to do my devotional readings, write this blog, and make a lovely cheese omelette for breakfast. .........Now it is 7:34, my clothes are dry, folded and all put away. And now I can relax, do some art, then take off for a deliciously long walk. Happy Friday, Gentle Reader.