Everyone does laundry wrong.
Last month, I watched a man my age use fabric softener as a detergent in a communal laundry room. The image lives on in my mind. It haunts me. I have lost sleep over it.
I wish I could believe that he had replaced the contents of the bottle with detergent or that he was simply adding the softener addition to detergent, but I know the terrible truth because I asked. I noticed he had no other detergent with him, and I offered my open box of imported German powder detergent in an attempt at neighborliness, but he doubled down. He explained that he had been using fabric softener for weeks since he ran out of proper detergent and that it worked well.
I responded, “that’s nice.” It was not nice. It was horrifying, but when you live in a building with a sicko like that, you cannot risk getting on their bad side. These people walk among us every day. They are at the grocery store and in the park. The State gives them driver licenses. Just to know this is a torment.
The issue was particularly acute in college. I would sit in class and gaze in horror at the people around me. We all lived in the same buildings, and the dreadful visions of half-broken detergent pods sitting in the machine at the end of a cycle and wet clothes left on the floor for days on end swirled in my mind. Sure these people could pronounce “Foucauldian” and understand math, but so many of them were hiding horrible, mildewy secrets. At least I checked the machines for mold.
Laundry talent is a terrible burden. To me, laundry day is not a day on which I happen to do laundry. Laundry day is a state of mind — an entire lifestyle. I wake up early. I go to bed late. I eat smaller meals. Everything else is secondary in the face of the great task at hand. Textiles are sorted into five or six groups. Fine detergents are imported from across the sea. Whites are dyed slightly blue. Socks are pre-soaked. Pants are air-dried. Pillowcases are ironed. Collars are starched.
As somebody who has been doomed to use communal laundry rooms for the better part of my adult life, I feel that I am in a position to say this is not the case for the median American. My years of watching other people do laundry have led me to believe that the process looks something like this:
At some interval — perhaps every few days, but maybe only once or twice each year — they gather all of the textiles in their home. They take their dark bedsheets (carefully selected for their ability to conceal filth), their softened towels (long ago stripped of any absorbency), clothes of many colors, and whatever else happens to be nearby. The collection is crammed into a single washing machine. Whether it fits is of no consequence.
Some people use detergent — probably a single-use pod. In a pinch, though, any liquid will do. Fabric softener is close enough, but why not try dish soap, shampoo, or Windex? The machine is left to do its work. When the cycle ends, the clothes are left to sit — preferably overnight. Eventually, the great, mildewed mass is cast into a dryer on the highest-available heat setting and left to sit for another night. Voila! This is the whole process.
Counted among the dead at the end are a sweater shrunk down to child size, three mismatched socks left on the floor of the laundry room, and anything light enough to show the effects of washing unsorted laundry with hot water. This, it seems, is acceptable to most people.
I detest these people the same way I detest people who live in warm states. I understand the appeal. I quietly envy the ease with which they seem to cruise through life, but the Calvinist in me knows that they are weak. They wear soft clothes. Three hours of ironing on a Sunday night would very likely kill them. That much ironing is enough to drive any person around the bend, but the suffering is good for me.
At the end of my last laundry day, I cried out in agony on the phone with my mother that “I would pay any amount of money for somebody else to make this problem go away.” This is a lie. There is a laundromat down the street with a sign in the window advertising same-day laundry service for $1.50/pound. I could spend laundry day lounging about. Perhaps I would read a book or eat charcuterie. $1.50/pound is not cheap, but it is not prohibitively expensive. The real price lies with letting another person do my laundry. I have seen other people do laundry. I know how that goes.
Distractions
Things I have been reading and watching this week.
Detroit: Today and Tomorrow - Twin Pines Dairy and the Detroit Board of Health.
I do not know how I came across this. It is my latest discovery in the very niche genre of mid-century public information films, which I love. It appears to be part of a larger series produced in the 1950s by something called the “Detroit Tomorrow Committee.” It is strangely mesmerizing and delightful, and it is also an interesting look into the history of public health in southeast Michigan.
“Production Library Music: The Story Behind the Sounds of TV, Film, and Radio” from Culture Shift on WDET.
Out of the same world of strange mid-century films comes this very interesting piece from WDET about production library music, which was the source of much of the music in these sorts of films. This particular piece focuses on the later music of the genre, but there is some really excellent, strange stuff from the earlier years, too. It is often the background music to films just like Detroit: Today and Tomorrow. The piece briefly discusses KPM, which I discovered on Spotify last fall and find to be both bizarre and charming.