At the Car Wash, yeah.

I have like five blogs running around in my head, rattling their cups along the bars in my brain, wanting out, but I haven't taken the time to sit and creatively compose their bodies yet. Instead of giving you something meaty right now, I want to tell you two stories from my new life here in Birmingham. One good. One...well not as good.

So I found a new simple pleasure in life. I remember reading Annie Dillard writing about how when she was young she used to put pennies on the ground and then hide and watch people find them. She loved to see their reaction when they found her pre-planted "lucky penny". But with inflation and pseudo-maturity, our backs became too stiff to reach for the lucky pennies. I wrote her words on my planner for a year, stating something like, "It is a sad thing when life becomes too hard to pick up a lucky penny, for we know that our life is, always, strewn with random change waiting for us to discover it." I discovered a lucky penny the other day. A simple life pleasure. The car wash. Growing up we always went to the "do-it-yourself" carwash, finding some kind of self-satisfaction from saving a couple of bucks and getting a little foam on our feet. But the other day I splurged and drove through one at a gas station for the first time. HOW COME NO ONE EVER TOLD ME ABOUT THIS?!? It was the most wonderful 2 minutes of my day, perhaps. The lulling of the water, the back and forth like I was a child being gently rocked. I don't know what else to say, except I don't know if I will ever pick up a foam brush again. It may be worth budgeting. heck, it may be worth going mudding, just to "need" a car wash. It was magical.

The other story takes a slightly different direction. It involves cleaning as well, but not the same end result, I'm afraid. I live in a very small apartment (room with a kitchen and bathroom) and don't have a washer and dryer. There is a laundrymat on the corner where I live (in a somewhat shady part of town, I will concede, but not dangerous). So I walk my basket over on Friday night, somewhat perturbed already that 1) I have nothing else to do but laundry on a Friday night, and 2) I really need to do laundry on a Friday night because I needed clean clothes to run in the next day. So I put in my clothes... put in my laundry detergent....and put in my money...all the essential components of the task at hand. I jam in the money, and the washer doesn't start. So my human inclination is, of course, to jam harder. It still doesn't work, so I try the one on the left... and the one on the right, and I notice a trend of not working. So I look up at the sign, and see that it says "No loads will be run after 8:00." I ask the man next to me drying his clothes what time it is, and he ....and he says 8:11. Right. So now my clothes are not only dirty (these are running clothes, so there is not hiding their filth) but they now have detergent on them, as well. So I'm throwing the clothes back in the basket, and as I get the last thing, I notice that there is something at the bottom of the washer. What is that? I look into the washer again...
it's poop.
Yes. There is poop in the washing machine.
That's the end of the story because really I don't know how things like this happen to me. I'm sure there is some kind of metaphor I could make here, something profound, but really. It was poop. Mingling with my clothes.

Welcome to my life. Car Washes and Washing Machines.