Today I'm grateful for laundromats

To be honest when I started writing today I wasn’t that grateful for laundromats. They seemed like an uninspired solution to an uninspiring problem, and I still largely feel that way. As the price of white goods plunge precipitously over the next few years you wonder how much longer these kinds of places will stick around. But the whole point of Great Fool was to feel grateful for everything — it’s even in the goshfuck tagline — so I wouldn’t be much of a great fool if I didn’t have a crack, and it turns out there is something to be grateful for. Man I said grateful so much in that sentence I’m a bit sick of it already.

except if it’s not immediately graspable ¯_(ツ)_/¯

So what could I possibly find to be grateful for in a common laundromat?

I’ll get the lightweight ones out of the way early on:

• when you go there it kinda makes you feel like you’re in a bland 90s sitcom where white people wearing no-brand button up shirts abound

• it allows people to wash their clothes without the hassle or expense of washing machines. This is the primary use case of the laundromat

this was an obvious choice for a gif but I still went there. see my reasoning was that I need to go to the toilet and I don’t have time to dig for something cutting

• starting in the 1940s, the coin laundry was probably the first business in the sharing economy and that’s fun to think about if you’re weird.

But there’s something deeper going on here with the laundromat. It enabled a brand new type of dynamic between people that lies somewhere between a hostel + share house living room on a weekend + tram stop + doctor’s waiting room + cafe + the next morning at a music festival + the hungover new girlfriend who wakes up first and finds herself in the kitchen with her boyfriend’s also-hungover housemate.

There’s an air of domestic familiarity at a coin laundry that causes people to let their guard down; I don’t know if it’s the “fuck off don’t judge me” clothes everyone’s wearing or the fact that no one really wants to be there, but there’s definitely a noticeable absence of fuck giving. It’s liberating to be part of this collective vulnerability in a world of deleting Instagram posts that don’t get a Like in the first minute. We’re putting on display a part of ourselves normally hidden even from housemates for the first month.

I’m grateful to still be able to find new social dynamics in 2017 that don’t involve technology, and I owe it all to laundromats.