Tag Archives: iPod

Early Saturday Morning, Drunk in the Laundromat

20 Nov

from October 15, 2009

This blog is going to be yet another Laundromat story. I tell you that upfront so that all of you who don’t like my Laundromat stories (i.e.: all of you) can log out now and go back to churning your butter or hitching your wagons or whatever else you were doing. Why do I write these things? Just to give my friends something else to not talk to me about if they ever see me again, which is seeming more and more unlikely lately.

I don’t blog much anymore, and that’s a blessing because how much crap can one person write about? On the other hand, as much as I can turn a trip to wash my old t-shirts into a three-page blog, I can also spend an entire day alone with someone and never seem to have a conversation of substance. But I digress.

My lack of blogging coincides almost exactly with my lack of sleep. Used to be just the opposite. I’d be up all night and sure enough, the next morning some ranty, vaguely coherent thing would be up and posted, and I’d have no memory of what drunken sailor actually wrote it. Instead, these past couple of weeks I’ve been unable to even stay in bed. I hit the pillow and ten minutes later I’m awake and watching TV. It is at moments like that, when my sales resistance is low, that I miss Billy Mays. There was nothing better than watching TV at 3am and being yelled at to buy Orange-Glo. (“BILLY MAYS HERE! Get out your CREDIT CARD and DIAL THIS NUMBER!” At this pint Billy would wave his hands in some mystical manner at the screen and chant “you WILL buy Orange-Glo… you WILL buy Orange-Glo… you Will buy Orange-Glo” and across the country thousands of hypnotized insomniacs would chant “yes Master,” get out their credit cards, and buy Orange-Glo. The man was a genius! BTW- “Mystic Manner” would be a good name for an album.)

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, sleep, my lack thereof. Instead of blogging I’ve been getting out of the house and walking around the neighborhood in the late night/early morning. Who else is out at 3am? Not a whole lot of people. What is there to see? Not a whole lot. It is really boring and if I didn’t bring my iPod I’d have gone insane(er). And speaking of my iPod, I put it on shuffle and for a random selection of songs, Alice in Chains seems to get played a heck of a lot considering that I have approximately one song by them on my iPod. (Man in the Box.) Well, my sleep has improved from horrendous to simply bad so that last Saturday morning I slept all the way through from 2am to the almost unprecedented hour of 5:30 in the morning. Refreshed and raring to go I was not, but hey, it was a start.

So I decided to not just take a walk but to be “productive.” That’s my word for when I get very antsy that the whole day has gone by and I’ve done nothing but lay on the sofa and watch infomercials (“You WILL buy Orange-Glo… you WILL buy Orange-Glo”) so I jump up, determined to clean out a closet and instead maybe toss out some old college papers I haven’t looked at since…wait for it…college. “Productive” for me that day was taking the wash to the Laundromat, so I picked up the laundry bag, put in the detergent and softener, softener sheets, and Oxy Clean (a Billy Mays “you WILL buy Oxy Clean” product) and walked the three blocks to the Laundromat. (And why does my spell-check insist on capitalizing “Laundromat”? It doesn’t capitalize “supermarket.”)

I then ran back home because, as you may have noticed, I failed to get dressed in the previous paragraph. So I put on my sweats and my FDNY hat (which I almost never wear anymore as it is a bit ratty) and started out again to do the laundry.

Going to do the wash at 5:30 in the morning has many benefits. They include:
A- Probably won’t run into Jolanta Rohloff
B- That’s good enough for me.

The laundry was empty except for the sleepy guy behind the counter and two middle-age mother types. And me. It was dark and cold and I was tired. But not tired enough to sleep. If I were at home I’d be not sleeping, so I was better off here not sleeping where I could watch the sun come up over the dryers. A very touching sight. If you have never seen the first golden rays of dawn breaking over a Tide-stained dryer you are really missing something. On the other hand, I missed it too as the day was overcast and I never did see the sun. But it did get a bit less grey.

With my headphones on (Man in the Box again!) I put my dirty clothes in the washer, added soap, softener, and Oxy Clean (“you WILL buy-“ oh enough of that) and then… what? So here I am, 5:30 or so in the morning, grey and crappy, with my dirty socks and t-shirts in the wash, CNN on the TV (I hate CNN. Did you catch Wolf Blitzer on Celebrity Jeopardy a few weeks back? He got a negative score. They dumb down the questions so much for the celebs that even Adam Sandler can answer a few. And I am going to trust Wolf Blitzer to tell me about the Middle East? No thanks.) and me with nothing to do for the next half-hour.

Maybe doing the laundry before dawn on a Saturday wasn’t such a good idea.

My iPod shuffled on, from Shirley Bassey to The Yardbirds to Zeppelin to Chuck Berry to Rob Zombie to Rhianna and on and on and on because I kept hitting the skip button to find a song I hadn’t heard a thousand times.

The store has a lot of seats but only a pair of tables and, being bored out of my mind, I sat at a table and just leaned forward and shut my eyes because, NOW I was ready to sleep. Great timing my sleep cycle has. Anyway, I didn’t really sleep because every time I might have come close, CNN blasted a BREAKING NEWS ALERT! loud enough to wake the dead, so loud that I shook back to consciousness after nearly, but not quite, catching a catnap. (What was the BREAKING NEWS ALERT! about? I dunno. I just turned up my iPod louder. I hope it wasn’t about a broken gas main in my apartment building. That would have sucked.)

I was awake for good now and I realized that while I was zoning out, one of the women had sat down next to me. Not near me, three seats away, or across from me, or at the other table, but right next to me. Literally. We were so close our thighs were touching.

I looked at her.
She looked at me.
I shifted in my seat.
She sipped her coffee.
I walked away.

That was the end of the most promising love affair I have had in awhile.

Mercifully, the washer was finished and I put my clothes in the dryer. Progress, sure, but now instead of having a half-hour to kill, I now had forty more minutes to kill. Great.

Sitting down at the table was out of the question. Besides, I was now over-tired. Me being tired and me being over-tired are light-years apart. Me being tired is yawning and wanting to sleep. Me being over-tired is like me being drunk. No, not me getting all maudlin and moaning about how crappy my life is, but me bopping along to the songs to my iPod and waggling my head like Paul in the Cavern Club while muttering along under my breath and generally looking like a drunk in the Laundromat.

Let me just point out, however, that there was an actual drunk in the Laundromat for a few minutes. He staggered in the front door and went right out the side door where he stood against the wall and drank coffee. It was disgusting because he kept the cup on the sidewalk but was incapable of puting it down without spilling, so every time he picked it up half of it was sloshed away. The disgusting part? He licked the sides of the cup, the cup he just picked up off the weedy sidewalk.

There I was, badly but quietly singing along to old blues with Howlin’ Wolf and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins while my clothes spun ‘round and ‘round and ‘round and ‘round and ‘round and ‘round and so on and so forth for forty minutes. It was just as much fun as it sounds, actually less.

Well, by 7:00 I was done. My clothes were done too. I folded them, stuck everything back in the laundry bag, and walked home.

What did I do when I got home? Went right to sleep. Of course.

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My Humiliating Experience, or “You Look Just Like My Father.”

14 Nov

from February 20, 2008

No, my humiliating experience was not my date Sunday night. That went very well, thank you very much. It better have gone well considering how much I spent on dinner, but especially in light of the fact that I broke one of my dating rules.

I only have two rules about dating. Rule Number One- don’t date co-workers, or as I usually put it, I don’t shit where I eat. Now in the past I have been stupidly tempted to break that rule. I’ve skirted the line, I’ve approached the line, I’ve danced on the line, I’ve peeked across the line, and I’ve been accused of crossing the line, but I’ve never broken that rule, despite the fact that I am so often so stupidly smitten.

Rule Number Two is never date a teacher. This dovetails nicely with the first rule, as I work with teachers, and it also excludes all the teachers in all the other schools. This is the rule I broke. In fact, I also broke Rule Number Two A- especially never date a math teacher.

But this is about my humiliating experience. That happened today.

I was buying a birthday card in the Hallmark store on 86th street. It was pretty quiet and I was the only one paying.

I was pretty laid back. It was one of those days where I was just doing my thing, like the post office, birthday card, lunch, all without the benefit of iPod so it was just me and my thoughts, and my thoughts were just as laid back.

I went to the counter and there were two girls there, both around 21 to 23 years old. They were kind of cute. Both of them looked like the kind of wholesome girls you usually only find outside of the city. One was blonde with straight hair and one had dark curly hair. Something about the dark one nagged me, and I realized that she looked like Janan Eways, only attractive and without the crazy eyes. (That’s an LHS reference some of you won’t get.) But they were young and I wasn’t interested.

I’ve never been interested in younger women, no mater what my own age. If I was 16, a 15 year old meant nothing to me. When I was 23, I wouldn’t care for a 21 year old. I’ve always been attracted to women my age or older. There’ve been a few notable exceptions, but that has pretty much been my way. I never planned it, that’s the way it was and the way it is. I like older women, or at least women my same age.

But as I paid I noticed the dark one, the one who rang me up. She was dressed in a blue top with a black apron, a part of her uniform. The blonde one had an apron too. She was not in anyway dressed provocatively, and even if she was the apron would have hidden it, but somehow, between her apron and shirt, a little fringe of frilly pink bra peeked out.

While I may not have been particularly interested in this young girl, she was legal age, and I had a few idle thoughts going through my head. Nothing dirty or lewd, but I am a healthy man and when confronted with a cute girl showing a flash of frilly pink bra the healthy man’s mind tends to wander a bit.

So as I handed her my money I was in a particularly better, though still laid back, mood, when the blonde one said “you look like my father.”

When no one answered her I turned around to see who she was talking to. There was no one there. She was talking to me.

“Um, oh?” I said, and it was the most coherent thing I could think of.

“Yeah, you look just like him.”

“Oh, OK.”

The dark one said “she’s a very random person,” and was not helpful at all.

“He had a moustache,” the blonde said.

At this point I managed a small grasp on things. “I used to have a mustache.” Pretty much everything in my head had gone screeching away in a cloud of dust. Bye bye, mellow mood. So long, pink bra.

Hello old man.

Had I had one at the time, this would have been a real erection killer.

I got my change and the girl said, again, “wow, just like him.”

“I guess that’s a compliment,” I sort of blurted.

“Oh yeah, my father is a good looking man.”

“Um, OK.”

And I left.

So I guess that wasn’t so bad, but I am only 37, not nearly old enough to be her father. I was just recently told by a teacher at LHS, (in the men’s room, and didn’t that make me want to zip up and leave?) that I have a youthful face.

But by God, being told that you look like a 21 year-old’s father while you are idly speculating about her friend’s pink frilly bra is a jolting experience.

So I’m at an age where, despite never being attracted to younger women, it is now a fact that younger women will not be attracted to me, except in a fatherly way?

Needless to say I am a bit confused about the whole thing, and I am now remembering times when I was told that I was just like someone’s father because I bought batteries on sale, (and yes that sounds old to me too,) or when Bonnie read my bio in Raphael’s Journalism class (the one where I was sexually harassed by a gay, beret-wearing Canadian- why the hell haven’t I ever blogged about that?????) and Bon said that I reminded her of her father.

So I’ve usually felt as though I was 37 going on 18, but just today I’m starting to feel like I’m 37 going on 58, with a couple of kids and a minivan.

So unless you are 37 or older, don’t flash your frilly pink bra when I’m paying for a birthday card, and never tell me that I remind you of your father unless we’re playing a spanking game in bed and you’ve been a bad bad girl.

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