Fun at the Laundromat

I just got back from another liberating experience at the laundromat. I love going to the laundromat. It's my chance to do my laundry, read, and be entertained by the weirdos in my neighborhood. I'm a fan of weird. Do you think geniuses are everyday, normal people? You can throw all the weird at me and I'm fine with it. But there comes a time when you realize it's just too much. Mental overdose. I entered the laundromat to that sweet clean clothes smell and recycled warm air...Thursday nights are usually dead there. Just a couple of odd folks. An overly obese lady with a nose-mole reading Desperation by Stephen King, testing the maximum load of the patio chair she was posted up in. She's got 3 kids and a Mexican boyfriend. Typical. I make my way to the area where I normally do my laundry. Sitting in my favorite chair is a malnourished man/woman/homeless person-thing patiently watching it's laundry. Said thing had a ponytail and was wearing what looks to be a man's long sleeve shirt, women's pants, and beach sandals. You can see the flaky, crusting skin around it's toes. A bonafide homeless tranny that looks like hammered shit. I was thrown sideways by this. I've seen weird. I've done weird. But this still manages to creep me out. Transsexuals, transvestites, drag queens, cross dressers, and whatever other hodgepodge of sexual/mental/emotional turmoil brings out in people all make me cringe with tribal fear. I'm a big fan of doing whatever you want, as long as you aren't making life difficult for one or more other people. Do what you want. Be who you are. Express your inner fucked-upness. Go back and figure out why they snipped your emotional umbilical cord when you were 6 years old. Let it all out... Fine. Just don't expect any pity or attention from me.



Then there's a hunchbacked old man, also with a ponytail, greasy Coke-bottle glasses, and strong opinions. Some guy comes in and asks if he can turn the TV off, fine with me, and the Hunchback of North Park starts giving his loud opinion about how if it was his laundromat, he'd take the TV out. Ok, sir. We got it. No need to say it 4 times. Right as I'm about to leave, there's another typical scenario: the fat, aging Mexican mother with her budding community of children. 4 kids trail in behind her, all of them ready to flap their lips in a language I don't understand and get on my nerves. No father in sight. And they do...all 4 of them rattling on...needing, wanting, and not getting. I exit, telling myself that when I get my own house, I'm buying the fanciest washer and dryer set ever made, just so I don't have to see these fucking people ever again.



I drive home to find (for the second time today) a homeless trash digger going through our dumpster. He's trying to hide behind his cart full of a heaping pile of unwanted junk, shielding himself from my headlights, and scurrying off as I pull up. Ok...I can deal with trash diggers. I don't like the idea of it, but...it's not that bad. I tend to ignore it. I see it a lot. After a while, you just accept them as part of the overall picture here. Urban decay, live at my dumpster, at any given moment.



My sister called me at the laundromat because she needed me to go online to find out some information for her. After I fix some coffee, I sit down at my computer altar. I'm messing around on the NBC website and I clicked a wrong link. I'm glad I did. I read, San Diego County Sex Offender Map, then click. Just what I need. Another sobering slap of reality. Input address, hit enter, and then a punch to the face. Reality again. Within an 1100 foot square of my house, there are over 45 blue circles and yellow squares peppering the map. A blue circle means Serious Sexual Offender and a yellow square means High Risk Sexual Offender. A High Risk Sexual Offender lives less than one block North of me. Pan out to 1700 feet and the blue circles start to overlap so much it looks like maybe some of them live together.

So that did it. I'm moving. I'm moving to a nice neighborhood where I don't have to see hunchbacks, homeless trannys, trash diggers, gang members, Mexicans with their rude children (ok, I probably can't escape that), and the harsh reality of knowing a High Risk Sex Offender lives a block away, and Serious Sex Offenders live within walking distance. Complain about the rich people at Starbucks all you want. It's better than homeless transexuals, trash diggers, hunchbacks, chomos, and rapists. Give me a rich asshole over people with severe identity/emotional/financial problems any day.

And what is it with sex offenders having that god-awful beard or way too long moustache. Every one of them. Always creepy looking and always with that moustache or beard. Child molesters always have that. Must be some sort of calling card for them. You never see a clean-cut child molester.



I thought I could handle the "bohemian/artistic" neighborhood I live in. It's too raw even for me. Here's the link. See for yourself.