The Good Dryer

May thirtieth. There is one dryer in our neighborhood laundromat that costs an extra quarter and nobody can explain why. The drum sounds fine. The heat seems equivalent. There is no visible difference between it and the dryer directly beside it. And yet every time I go, at least three people avoid it on principle, which means it is almost always available, which means I always end up using it, because I have no principles when it comes to dryers.

Simone came with me this time, which I want to be clear was not a planned thing. We were both at the end of a shift and she mentioned she also had laundry to do and we have now apparently reached the level of friendship where co-laundry is a real activity we participate in together. She arrived with a reusable bag and an opinion about cart logistics that I did not ask for and was completely correct. I arrived with two mismatched mesh bags and a roll of quarters I had been carrying in my purse for a week. We sorted this out.

the great dryer debate, documented

The part I keep thinking about is the waiting. There is a specific quality to sitting in a plastic laundromat chair watching a drum turn that is unlike almost any other kind of waiting. It has no urgency. You cannot do anything about the cycle. The machine has the authority. Simone scrolled through her phone like a person who has made peace with all of this. I stared at the ceiling for a while and then we talked about nothing in particular for about twenty minutes, which was genuinely a nice twenty minutes.

one of us is handling this better than the other

I registered for the outdoor skills workshop last month. The number on the paper cleared the cost the same way the letterpress workshop cleared it in 2012, the math wasn't the question, the number was just there to confirm what I already knew. I have been thinking about that symmetry for a few weeks, and the laundromat, for reasons I cannot fully explain, was where it finally settled into something writable. A number written on paper does one thing: it gives you something to compare a cost against when you already know what you want. That is all it has ever done. The 2011 number did it. The 2017 number did it. The arc is probably done now, and that feels right. The good dryer was available. I used it.