Well, let’s see… AHHH YES! The plummer burst in the under garage where I live, which meant my laundry room was completely flooded with ‘ankle high’ water. And i had 5 days of laundry piled up and no time to do it, due to the fact that i was in the studio all day Mon -Fri and had Julian this weekend (till about 5pm) then Rusty and me had to have a ‘meeting’ with the A&R guy from the label of the artist we’re producing. I got in around 10pm only to find (our housemate) Kate and her girlfriends plunging the kitchen sink, which had backed up cause she put carrots in the garbage disposal, DESPITE the fact that Rusty asked us not to put hard food down that thing. To which she confessed to also putting broccoli and spinach as well. So now our kitchen sink is backed up also.

So i got up at 7am and walked down to the laundromat (it’s 3 blocks away) with 2 bags of clothes. This was simple enough, as it only took 26 min. to wash and 30 min to dry. I was there for less than an hour. But it was an interesting hour. and it went like this…first i put the 2 loads in the washer, added the soap, put the money in ( $1.50 ) and let er rip. Walked to Starbucks, got a vanilla soy latte ( $2.60 ) and then walked over to the Newsagent where Hannah’s admirer works ( he was desperately looking around, waiting for her to ‘pop’ in and by HEAT magazine but alas, she’d buggered off to England the week before. Sorry mate! ) and I bought an LA TIMES (yuk) and that cost $0.54, which to me is $0.53 too much. I then walked back to my clothes. About 15 minutes had gone by so i had 11 minutes left.

Then these two characters who looked like Jerry Springer rejects from Kentucky walked in with their sleeping bag and clothes. he was tall and dirty but looked like he probably had ambition at one point in his life. Sometimes i think i ‘get people’ from a first impression. She was spent jet trash with rotten teeth who used bad languange constanly. “How does this f*ckin machine work?” She was loud as well. They were obviously Crackheads. And they’d obviously been sleeping on the beach (it’s been relatively warm here lately) because when they took their sleeping bags out sand flew everywhere. My laundry was now done washing.

it was time to toss it in the dryer. My ORIGINAL plan was to throw them in the dryer (it takes 30 min to dry, as oppoed to England, which takes decades just to dry a pair of trousers) and then walk to the Omelette parlour for breakfast. See, that’s one of Hannah and my favorite places to eat. And I know i could totally rub it in if she’d that, not only had i seen her boy at the news agent but i’d also gone to the O.P. Now, if i’d gotten a pedicare at Toe Heaven next door, i would have accomplished a trifecta and thus brought upon a Hannah wrath unknown to mankind. And see, she’s flying out his on the 12th of february on business, just in time to kick my ass! But hopefully, just in time for a nice Valentine’s day!

But all those thoughts were gone, now that Mr and Mrs Trailor were in the Laundrymat with me. I had an eerie feeling that if i left i wouldn’t have any clothes left. i wasn’t being entirely fair but, from experience, i’ve learned that people who smoke crack aren’t really a good judge of right and wrong. They also are not very dependable. And they steal. So i decided to read Mike Penner’s great article on why the Eagles are gonna lose the Superbowl. But it was feeling cramped in the ‘mat so i stepped outside. That’s when the tall guy approached me ( by the way, i immediately concluded he was trying to distract me so they could steal my clothes but i was totally wrong and a bit presumpteous ) and asked if there were any cheap motels in Santa Monica. i asked how cheap?

” $30 or less”
” $30? Not around here. You better try downtown”
” Yeah, that’s what we were thinking. Thank you very much, sir.”

See, i was right. The guy had good grammer and he carried himself like he came from a decent family. He didn’t even seem like someone who’d even gone to jail, though I would certainly bet that if you smoke crack you’ve probably spent sometime in the slammer. And if you’ve been in the slammer addicted to drugs, i’d even go so far as to suggest you probably engaged in some ‘unconventional’ sexual activites. people who’ve usually gone through those types of things more than often exhibit anger at society and everyone around then. of course WE NEVER MADE THEM smoke crack but now, all of a sudden, it’s OUR fault and now WE need to give them loose change, as if WE should feel guilty because THEY want to smoke crack. But not this guy. he had an ATM card AND a credit card. i saw him use the ATM to gt cash and i saw him use the CC to make a call. Were they his? that, i don’t know.

But he WAS polite. My guess is he’d gotten mixed up with the wrong people, made some mistakes and split town from where ever the hell he’s from. And he probably met her somewhere along the way, and crack was all they had in common. it was like a classic American love story, accept with crack. My clothes were ready now and so I folded them and even got to ‘shoe off’ a Jehovah’s Witness on my way out the door. Crackheads and a Jehovah’s Witness, all in the same day. it was time to get back to the studio, as it was Monday morning. So i figured I HAD to write about my morning because there wasn’t anything else I wanted to write about. So I wrote it. So there.

Mike Randle