Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Bro Does His Laundry


My apartment, as I said in my last post, is generally ok, but there’s one problem.

            I don’t have my own washing machine, which means that once a week I have to take my clothes to the laundry mat in the strip mall.  Of course, the only time I have time for this is on weekends, when the bus doesn’t run.  Which means I have to walk.  That wasn’t a problem at the beginning of the semester, when I could just stick my stuff in a suitcase and wheel it along behind me.  It worked for a time, but I knew those halcyon days wouldn’t last forever.  I knew the snow would come.

            Which, of course, it did.  And with it, my life has taken a surreal, Jack Londonesque turn.  My fifteen-minute stroll to school has become a desperate struggle through a blinding white void.  The mile walk to the laundry mat has become a tactical expedition through sheets of blowing snow and howling winds as cold as death.  My poor suitcase, designed for a carefree career of being rolled across marble airport floors, is not quite up to the challenge.  The snow gets stuck in the wheels, and you may as well be dragging the stupid thing.  So I take a plastic sled and some rope, tie the suitcase (with the laundry in it) to the sled, and then drag it behind me through the snow.  Which sounds ridiculously annoying, and it is, but I also get to pretend I’m a Ket hunter dragging his sled through the endless forests of Siberia.  Which is fun.

            Fun Ket fact: the traditional Ket unit of land measurement (like a mile or km) was the itaŋ, literally “day-drag”: the distance a man could drag a sled in one day.

            So the other day I got my sled and suitcase together as usual and set off for the laundry mat.  I walked for what seemed like an eternity.  The cold pierced through my coat, but I trudged on, leaning into the freezing wind.  Time and space blended together in the storm’s rage.  Somewhere in the distance I could hear Yes playing “South Side of the Sky”:


            I staggered on, and in the corner of my eye, visions of Vikings stepped from the snow and beckoned me to join them.  Tall and proud they stood in their horned helmets and chainmail loincloths (ouch).  Fair rang the song of the Valkyries, wheeling above my head.  My time had come, they told me.  They beckoned me to join them, to let the storm consume me, that I might take my place at the feasts of Valhalla!

But no…I hadn’t finished my quest to become Midgard’s mightiest comparative philologist!  My journey was not over yet.  My eyes met the Viking chief’s, and I shook my head.  My road did not end here.  He nodded, understanding my quest yet regretting the loss of such a mighty ally in the war of Ragnarok.  A single tear rolled from his battle-weary eye.  I adjusted the laundry sled’s rope on my shoulders, and turned my back on the gates of Valhalla.

I looked around me, hoping to fathom some landmark in the void, something to tell me where I was.  Somewhere in the distance, a vague outline could be seen through the whirling snow.  It was…my mailbox. 

I was standing at the end of my driveway, perhaps fifty feet from my front door.

            Screw this.  I turned around and headed back inside.  It’s time for the big guns.  Deep in the recesses of my closet I unearthed a misshapen cardboard box, and took out my secret weapon against winter: my Mongolian winter robes:

            Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, a winter deel.  Used in Mongolia by the world’s baddest-ass nomads, this is a garment that not only keeps you warm when eagle-hunting/Eurasia-conquering in thirty-five below, but it also makes you look good doing it.  Quilted on the inside with wool felt and topped with a padded hantaaz jacket, the warmth of this thing is only exceeded by the jaw-dropping awesomeness of freakin’ cool as hell dragons woven in freakin’ gold silk.  In fact, when I’m wearing it, I have to go outside right away or I start sweating.  But just to be safe, underneath I layered with long underwear, fleece, sweatshirt and a camel-hair vest (also Mongolian).  Around my neck I wound an Andean llama-wool scarf, and put rabbit-fur mittens on my hands.  Upon my head I placed a Russian hat that had once been something alive and cute.  Thus attired, I stepped back outside, astronaut-like, into the frigid vacuum.

            Except it wasn’t a frozen white void anymore, it was a frozen black void.  It was 2:45 PM, you see. The sun had gone down.

            I walked along the forest trail—that’s right, in Alaska the laundry mat’s on the other side of a frozen Forest of No Return, full of angry wolves, bigfeet and, for all I know, wooly mammoths.  But at least I didn’t have to worry about the cold anymore.  The blizzard unleashed its fury on my deel; it did as much to me as much as a gentle wind to a stone pillar.  What was I thinking earlier—this, cold?  You call this winter?  Pathetic.

            In fact, I was hot.  Wishing Fairbanks would get some cool weather for a change, I took off my dragon jacket, badass as it was.  I continued on through the heat of the day (night?), unfastening my top buttons to let a little air in and cool off.  Global warming.  We used to have real winters when I was a kid, not these wimpy death-rattles of an ecosystem destroyed by the avarice of Man.  I didn’t come to Alaska to die of heat exhaustion.  If I wanted that, I’d go back to Hangzhou.  Ridiculous.

            I made a triumphant entrance in the laundry mat that day.  Ice clung to the rims of my glasses, and I dusted snow from my princely Mongol garb as I stepped in.  Around my shoulders was lashed a rope leading to a plastic sled carrying an oversized suitcase.  The owner of the establishment, always one to choose his words carefully, regarded me for a moment over his newspaper.

            “What the fuck’s this?” he said by way of greeting.

            I paid for a machine, threw my clothes in, and sat down in a plastic chair.  On the TV a courtroom drama was playing.  Year-old People magazines littered the table in front of me.  I exchanged awkward nods with the fat man next to me.  I could have been in any laundry mat in the country, and compared the manner of my laundry trip to that of a reasonable, well-adjusted person.

Damn, I thought.  I didn’t bring a book.

Thursday, December 6, 2018

Bro Goes to Alaska


                So as a few of you guys might know, I’m currently in Fairbanks, Alaska to do grad school.  This is my first time in Alaska, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Same as any other American town, I figured, just colder.  So I got an apartment about a fifteen-minute walk from school, but on the very edge of town.  There’s a bus stop, which is fortunate because there’s no other way to get to the supermarket unless you feel like walking for hours in subzero wind.  But there’s no true civilization nearby, except a strip mall a mile or so away from my apartment.

                Speaking of my apartment, it’s quite a place.  My landlord decided to take an old single-family house and turn it into an apartment building.  To get to my apartment, you go inside, down the stairs, and take a right.  That is to say, I’m a denizen of the lower depths.  The underdark.  I am…a basement dweller.  Not in the sense that I’m living in my Mom’s house having 3:00 AM online arguments with strangers about Boba Fett, but in the sense that my apartment is literally in the basement and all you can see out the window is dirt.  Frozen dirt actually.  Permafrost.

                My apartment is an ok place to live, if you don’t mind the front door not closing and the bedroom door not existing—“an open-concept apartment”, they said.  The hole in the front door’s frame doesn’t match up with the doorknob, so it never really closes.  When I leave in the morning, I just set the deadbolt, which I tell myself works just as well.  I sleep on an air mattress and have exactly one plate, one glass, one fork, and one beer stein that I drink oolong tea out of.  But that’s ok, because I’m in grad school and this is apparently how it’s supposed to be. 

The apartment has a fireplace (that doesn’t work) and tile floors, which of course is great to walk on barefoot when it’s freezing.  Still, it turns into a decent enough place with a six pack in the fridge and a Conan the Barbarian poster on the wall:

It really ties the room together. 
Being as it is on the edge of town, my place is on a dirt road in the middle of this great little redneck wonderland that somehow got transplanted from the Ozarks.  My neighbor on one side is a guy with a “Don’t tread on me” flag and an upside-down jeep in his lawn.  Across the street the house is surrounded by a chainlink fence topped with barbed wire.  Perched on the roof is a satellite dish almost as big as the house itself.  This, I can only assume, was installed the purpose of intercepting transmissions between Bigfoot, the Pentagon, and their alien overlords.  Behind the houses is the vast, eternal forest stretching far, far into the distance.  I like reminding myself that if I started walking west from my apartment, I would not leave this forest until I reached Norway.  The forest behind my house forms part a circle around the world,  the immensity of the Canadian and Alaskan subarctic.

                It’s an interesting neighborhood.  A couple months ago I was coming home from school.  I walked up my driveway and I saw my neighbor standing in front of my house:




                JUST KIDDING THAT’S A MOOSE.  A MOOSE WITH HORNS.  A BULL MOOSE IS IN MY LAWN.  I didn’t notice him until there couldn’t have been more than twenty feet between us (picture taken later).  It was huge.  Each noticed the other at the same time, and froze with the same jolt of adrenaline.  Our eyes met.  These things charge people, don’t they?  I thought.  Shit.  I moved as fast as I could without making sudden movements behind my landlord’s car.  There now being a physical barrier between us, I backed away down the driveway, and into the dirt road.

                Well, what do I do now?  There he was, blocking my building’s front door, gnawing cheerfully on a shrub.  I decided I wouldn’t try to scare him away, since I didn’t feel like getting killed.  But I couldn’t get inside with him in front of my door.  All I could do was wait in the street.

                I must’ve stood for twenty minutes, watching him eat.  His bored, dumb eyes mocked me.  So, moose, I thought.  Despite the toys and contrivances of Man, you have defeated me.  it was then that the door opened, and my landlord stepped out.  His eyes, too, met the moose’s, and they regarded each other with what I can only call a bored acknowledgement, like when you see a coworker on a Tuesday morning.  There clearly being some mutual understanding between them, he walked out the door, perhaps five feet from certain death, and asked me what I was doing standing there.  “He won’t hurt you,” my landlord said, rolling his eyes at the effete delicacy of people from the Lower 48. “Just walk by him and go inside.”  I looked back.  The moose had moved to about ten feet from the door.  Just walk by him…

So, gathering up my courage, that’s what I did, more than meeting my recommended daily intake of mortal danger.  Sure enough, the moose didn’t bother me at all, probably because my landlord told him I was cool.