Oh sure, there's free laundry services available. There's the Meeting Place. There used to be CONC. RIP CONC. And there's Regent Park Community Health. Awesome. They all suck. They're all fucking scary. They're all a huge pain. There's this weird assumption that somehow, if you have an apartment or some kind of housing, you magically have a laundromat budget. Or a washer & dryer in your place. Wouldn't that be amazing? That would be so cool. But you don't. You have a pile of dirty clothes, you have dirty clothes on your body, you have a bathtub or shower or something like that which is also probably dirty, and you have a bucket, and you can go out and find one of those plastic things that holds milk. Egg/milk crates, whatever they are. And a toilet. If you have all those things, even if you don't have a shower, as long as you have something you can use to fill the bucket with water, you can do laundry. And something to dry it on, like a radiator or a heater or a sunny window or something. A teepee with a fire in it, whatever. And either some laundry soap or some hand soap or some shampoo or some lemons or some baking soda or vinegar or borax or some fuckin' thing to soften up the water. If you're washing wool, just use either shampoo or vinegar. But yeah, here's how to do it:
You put the clothes into the bucket with your softened water. Just use as little product as you can possibly get away with. It's better to have to wash your clothes again because you didn't use enough, than to have to spend all day rinsing clothes by hand and foot, because holy shit, soap is hard to get out. That's another good reason to use vinegar, baking soda or dumpster-dived lemons... because it's way easier to rinse that stuff out. Rinsing is gonna be your biggest pain in the ass. If you've got something that's super dirty, grab a scrub brush and scrub it. But yeah, basically a bucket to soak stuff in, step on it with your feet, squeeze it with your hands, whatever you gotta do to force that water through that clothing.
The plastic crate thing is for getting water out of your garment. Draining. You drain the water out after washing and before each rinse, so you get as much soapy water out as possible. And then of course you also do that before drying, so it's not dripping while you're drying the shit. Sucks to have a big puddle under your drying clothes. If you've got shower or a tub or you're doing this outside, you can also use the crate to rinse and dry stuff out faster by kind of shaking it. Shaking the water out of it. Maybe while pouring other water on top of it, with the shower or whatever you have. The cool thing about doing your laundry manually is that you can tell when it's clean: the rinse water runs clear instead of all dirty and stuff. You want to be rinsing into a toilet, or into something that can handle a lot of dust, bits and pieces of stuff, bits of fabric, hair, all that stuff. This is why it's not great to do it in a bathtub, unless you've got a drain filter on it. You know, one of those little metal filter things. Clogging your bathtub is a great way to get evicted. So whatever you're draining it into, make sure it's either filtered or up to the task of evacuating a ton of particles. Because that's what's in your dirty laundry: shitloads of little particles of hair, fabric, dust, bits of skin, all that shit.
When people first learn how to make soup, they usually make the mistake of doing massive soups. Which turns into a deterrent to doing it often. Same thing with laundry. Just do a few garments at a time, or even just one. Do small loads often. That's the way. It's easy to bite off more than you can chew and end up with a pile of half-clean, still-soapy, wet clothes, your hands and legs all numb from trying to rinse them, roommates outside your bathroom being like "what the fuck dude I need to shower to go to work because yeah I work, I have a job, I work, I have a job, I have this thing called a job..." on and on and on. They think you need reminding. They think you need motivating. They think without motivation, you're not going to magically change your life around. They think it really is a matter of you just deciding to stop being a loser. They think that because it helps them have their shitty attitude about poverty that's necessary for them to live their lives as they do. They'll get theirs. They'll have that day where they lose their job and just can't find a new one. And for now, they need to remind you that they have a job and you don't. Because they need to either ignore politics or support politicians who want you to get even less support than you do. They need their mentality. So that's why they do that shit. So you want to not let them find out you're doing your laundry in the bathroom. So just do it one piece at a time and make it seem like you gotta take lots of little shits or something. You can even break up the act of laundering one thing, like a bedsheet or something, into a few sessions, so you're not in the bathroom for too long at any given time. That's a good trick.
If you can, dry your stuff in the sun. The sun's rays have radiation in them, which is good for decontaminating stuff. It'll reduce the possibility of mold, stankiness, all that shit you're trying to avoid. So if you have a window that gets some sun, maybe with a space heater underneath it, that's awesome. If you're in the bush and you have a clear plastic tarp that you can put up and make a little clear tent out of, that's awesome. The problem with drying your stuff over a fire is, it'll always smell like campfire, and employed, housed people will want to talk about that all the time. They'll take any opportunity to remind you that you're doing things wrong by not just choosing to magically have a different life. There's nothing you can really say to hide the fact that you're camping in the bush, which to them means you're also a crack addict, even if you're not, people don't have the capacity to believe that you'd be camping unless you do have some kind of serious substance abuse issue, so there you are. You have to be OK with them thinking you're on lots of crack. And being surprised that none of the behaviors are there. There's just no way to get them to understand what's actually going on. So this is one of the reasons it's hard to maintain a job or a relationship or something that's outside the poverty world when you're living in poverty. Because even if you're not drying your clothes on a fire, handwashed clothes are just different. Sun-dried clothes are just different. If your clothes don't smell like detergent and fabric softener, and don't seem like they were washed in a washer and dried in a dryer, that brings you one step closer to losing the job, the girlfriend, the boyfriend, the housing, whatever it is. Because to people who aren't living in poverty, and even some who are, it means one thing: crack. And surely, soon, meth. But people are a little slow to catch on. People don't even have heroin in their consciousness, which is funny because it's hugely popular. But yeah, one way or the other, they need to think that poverty is because of drug addiction, and drug addiction means uselessness, so as great as it is to be able to do your laundry without cost, it's also going to bring you further into poverty as long as there's something outside the poverty world that you're trying to hang on to.
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