Illustration by D. Tarnowski.
As Rocko from Rocko’s Modern Life so famously proclaimed, “Laundry day is a very dangerous day.” While RML is a great reminder as to why all children’s television show creators should drop acid before writing each episode, this quote really hammers the point home. Laundry day is the most dangerous day of the week, month, or whatever time period it is you do your laundry in and it doesn’t take mind altering psychedelics to understand why.
As long as people have been wearing clothing (pronounced “klawth-ing”) there’s always come a time when that clothing has needed to be washed. Ancient Sumerians who lived in Mesopotamia realized that one spot in the river where they rinsed their loincloths got them exceptionally clean. What they didn’t realize and what it took scientists years later to figure out, was that the reason why was not because some special plant grew in that area but because the dead, whose funeral rites took place somewhat further upstream, produced a natural “soap” from body fat that collected in the pools. And thus, the first washing machine was birthed into the world by the very literal blood and sweat of human beings.
Aside from that, the real danger in laundry is that it will never, ever stop. You’ve heard the one about the socks making a break for it once they’re in the dryer. The reason is because they’re tired of getting dirty.
Laundry just keeps repeating the same cycles of clean and dirty and rinse and wash and spin and rinse and spin and clean and dirty… sometimes, I wish laundry just stayed clean forever. As the dirty pile gets higher, the want to do it gets lower and lower. The whole process is just one large cycle, as if someone in the sky set the universe knob to “start” and pulled it out.
That’s another reason laundry is so dangerous; like the socks planning their escape, we too want to escape the cycle. Most people will notice if your clothing smells bad. They’ll be vocal about it as if they had nothing better to do than indict you. Clothing gets it the worst in the summer, causing the whole affair to speed up and threaten to derail itself.
“Going commando” to avoid doing laundry is a nasty trick because it catches up with you like a world-class sprinter. Before you know it, whole pairs of jeans are bought to avoid the inevitable and eventually drawers of your dresser are overflowing with seven pairs of the same pants. And they all smell like you were sitting in a rotting pile of leaves all day. At that point, you’re better off just wearing nothing at all. But isn’t that the point of “going commando” in the first place?
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August 17, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Dan
Well put. I never do my laundry until every single thing I own is dirty.
By coincidence, I just did my laundry today. Carrying my heaving laundry bag, I happened to see my reflection in a store window. The bag was easily five times the size of my torso. I looked like an enormous, moving boulder with legs.
August 17, 2009 at 10:57 pm
onlives
Great image Dan! Perhaps an illustration is on the way?
Yeah. Recently, I only washed my underwear. I did it in my bathroom sink. I just did not want to be faced with heading to the laundromat. I got plenty of t-shirts and my shorts and pants are in strong supply, so it seemed kind of silly to bring half of my clothes there.
This brings up an interesting side note: I have a multitude of t-shirts I forget to wear when I wash clothing on the basis of washing my underwear. That’s usually the signal that laundry needs to be done for me. It seems I should either buy more underwear or thin the herd of t-shirts. Probably getting more underwear wouldn’t be a bad idea, because otherwise, I’ll have a smaller amount of clothing that needs to be washed more frequently. But I don’t want to accumulate too much. There’s got to be a balance struck. The bathroom sink when necessary seems to be my solution.