Laundryroom Swapmeet

I thought we could take a minute and check in with the whole family.

I’m always singling them out, treating these sundries and variouses as just piece after piece of isolated swapmeat, if you will.  And that serves my purposes well enough—these oddities, or at least the photographs of them presented on this page, exist largely for my mockery—but it’s nice to be reminded now and then that there is a greater social sphere in which these items co-mingle. 

It’s not, in other words, just a collection of individual items—a pair of flipflops, a basket, some yarn, that damned fondue pot—but something more.  It’s a great big pile of crap, a melting pot of apartmental cohabitation.

A cheese-melting pot, maybe.  Is anybody ever going to take that thing?

I love looking through my apache logs.  For one thing, I’m a numbers dork, and all those delightful statistics simply please me.

But one of my favorite aspects of log-trolling is the search string rundown.  Of all my websites, the swapmeet gets the most interesting variety of search strings, and almost every one seems like disappointment manifest.  How must it feel to search for, as an example, “toaster cozy”, and follow a link to a post that offhandedly mocks the very notion?

It can not feel particularly good, is my reckoning.

The hits are so consistent, and so consistently weird, that I will probably add a daily search string feature to the sidebar, so you, faithful reader, can see all the weird crap that I see, and revel in all the laughable disappointments in which I revel.

But I wanted to write this because of one specific and superlative search string—a search string that not only reveals something about the nature of this site, but also stands as monument to the powerful stature that the swapmeet holds over very, very specific niches of the web.  What is this search string?

spell the noise of a fart

Are you amazed that that leads to this site?  If so, you will be even more amazed—and, if you are anything like me, tremendously delighted—to know that this site is the top google hit for that search.

And it make sense.  Frankly, if you need to know how to spell the sound of a fart, I can help you out.

So we’ve seen all the individual items from the grocery bag of splendor. I admit that when I was analyzing them, I treated each as if it were a solitary item, devoid of context—a serial parade of one-offs. Was I naive to do so? Perhaps, and so let me make amends by offering herein a more inclusive discussion of, not the items as individuals, but the grocery bag contents as a gestalt.

First, the manifest:

• little blue (jewelry?) box
• stained lacy thing
• shower clock radio
• another clock radio
• terry net bathband
• pink happy candle
• two makeup kits
• uninflated globe
• motivational stickers

So: two clock radios; two items-with-mirrors (the jewelry box, the mirrored shower radio); two makeup kits; two adornment-related items (jewelry box, pair of makeup kits); two shower items (shower radio, terry net bathband); two hundreds of motivational stickers; two stains on the lacy thing; and, at last, two-candle container—with only one candle!

Twos everywhere. A fearful symmetry! An unsettling duality! Here, in this bag, on this table, an ominous reflection of the strange couplings of the universe.  For every action a reaction!  For every shower clock radio a non-shower clock radio!

Where is that missing candle? Where can it be?!

Yes. So, in summary, I still don’t know what the hell a terry net bathband is.

Holy crapcakes!  This is like a whole swapmeet in a bag!  It’s ridiculous!  My freakin’ cup floweth over, here!

You can’t really tell from the photo, here, but there’s better than a dozen distinct items in that bag.  It’s a bounty!  A boon!  If there was a long-lost Great Aunt Swapmeet, and she died?  This is what she’d leave me.

Ridiculous!

Remember this fellow, the is-he-or-isn’t-he broom?  We’ve seen him before, here and again here.

As you can see, he’s escaped the laundry room, and is now hanging out in back of the building, near the trash cans and recycle bins.  I’m willing to consider the mystery solved, then; this is no mere swapmeet item, to flit in and out of my life in the matter of a day or two.  This is a regular.

I’m going to call him Mr. Broom.

Seeing him out here, on the rough cement of the courtyard, some things begin to make sense.  His calloused, worn-down bristles have probably scraped this cold grey floor many a time, no?  This is Mr. Broom’s element—he is a street broom, an outdoorsman.  A roughneck.

What was he doing in the laundry room at all?  How did he feel about that, his scraggled apparatus called into action on such smooth, bourgeois linoleum, unscarred and unscraped by the truth of life on the sidewalk?

I salute you, Mr. Broom.  I salute the hell out of you.

Another Who’s Who In The Laundry Room celebrity!  This fella likes to hang out in the northwest corner of the room, facing, as you can see, the wall. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mr. Baby Stroller.

What’s disconcerting here is that Mr. Baby Stroller is pretty consistenly here.  Is he merely being stored?  Do some parents in the building live on a different floor and prefer not to navigate the elevator?  No, that’s ridiculous.

Perhaps the child for whom this stroller had been daily transport has since graduated to parambulation?

Perhaps something more sinister has occurred?

Best not to think about it.  It’s not clear, regardless, that the stroller either is or is not part of the swapmeet.  I’d speculate that such a distinction is entirely functional: the swapmeet is defined precisely as those things that are taken after being left in the laundry room.  Should one of the washing machines turn up missing, voila: the swapmeet has expanded to home appliances.

I’ll keep an eye on this guy and see what happens.

Since the table was more-or-less empty, I took a few pictures of other laundry room denizens.  Seen here: Mr. Bike.  Mr. Bike likes to hang out a couple of feet away from another laundry room regular, Mr. Sign.  You can see him up in the top right corner of that picture.

Here’s another picture of Mr. Sign:

It is safe to say that Mr. Bike and Mr. Sign don’t get along.  However, being inanimate objects, they can’t do much about it.  This is, I think, good material off which to base some sort of metaphysical horror story.

Potent though their conflict is, I cannot help but feel that Misters Bike & Sign are naive agents, pawns of some greater forces.  The visible limbs of unseen gods.  I do not know who these great beings—these shadowy antediluvians—might be; in my mind I call them Ms. Building Manager and Mr. Guy With Bike And Attitude.