Sunday, 27 July 2003 | Laundry enemies

Piercing a slender needle into the scruff of my cat's neck is easier than I'd imagined; getting a urine sample from her is not. I discovered that when I leave a pile of cleanish clothes on the floor and I don't put any litter in her box, the pile of clothes can just as well serve as the litter.

This evening it somehow made sense to me to carry an army bag full of urined laundry to a hard-to-access part of Brooklyn, because then I could wash clothes with company. Company makes it easier to ignore the unappealing details of the laundromat: the coin machines that have a taste for perfectly ironed bills, the cranky washing machines that are coated with a residue of sticky detergent, the squeaky wheels on rusty carts, grayish pink lint that bonds like sorority sisters, the dryers that cook and shrink my cotton, the TVs that play the otherwise forgotten shows, the mean-faced people that don't want to be there either. Company is also capable of turning the chore into a nearly thoughtless process, a simple, necessary act like brushing teeth.

I hadn't, however, counted on the post-laundry thunderstorm that tore the sky over me on my walk home. It quickly and unremorsefully undid much of the work the quarter-eating dryer had just performed.