Now, I’m hardly a prude. And I hate doing laundry. I even have free laundry in my current apartment, a mere two floors down in the basement. I still can’t be arsed. I watch the hamper fill and eventually overflow and yet I remain motionless. There are always more clothes. My bedsheets can smell up to and including “roadkill in the summer” before I think I have to change them. I am not a clean person. And you think I would be, as I’ve worked from home for some 15 years now, and would keep the place I spend no less than 20-24 hours a day in a close to pristine condition. But you’d be wrong, as I’ve only become more comfortable with the “aura” that I produce spending so much time here. It will not shock you that my girlfriend does not have much of an urge to move in. The level of desperation it must take to date me is not matched by the level of desperation to live with me, it would seem.

And even I think 30 uses of one towel before washing it is somewhere between icky and obscene. There comes a point with that kind of towel usage where you’re undoing the work of the shower you just took. You’re at best running in place to clean yourself and then dry off with a collection of detritus that has advanced to writing its own constitution. At the very least, Orlovsky should have a rotation of two or three towels, and however much you use all three before a reset is a personal choice. Also, splurge on towels, you’ll find it’s worth it to get as close to a hotel feel as you can.

It reminds me of my senior year of college, and when any story about the depths we will go to in our own filth it usually reminds people of their senior year of college. I had a roommate who only had one towel, as we lived in what certainly was an illegal basement apartment on Comm Ave in Boston. It was apparently listed as a doctor’s office, and I vaguely remember some shuffling and rearranging we had to do once for some type of inspection to make it look anywhere near the ballpark of a doctor’s office. What we did with the six-foot bong I couldn’t tell you, but I know it hit the heights of creativity.

Anyway, the one towel. He never washed it. At some point, it went beyond the consistency of cardboard and became its own element. He hung it not on the shower rod, but on one of the heating pipes that ran through the apartment and the bathroom (again, illegal). Which meant it was poised basically right where one would stand to take a piss. And I and every one of his other roommates would swear that towel would reach out for you while you were relieving yourself. Not to creep you out or to make you part of whatever colony was living on and within it, but as a cry for help. “Please, get me to the washer, I only ask so much and every day is worse than the last…”

We joked, mostly to just hide our fear, that we would come home from the bar one day to find the towel on the couch, watching TV, and having a smoke and a beer, plotting its escape. The towel certainly had become self-aware enough.

I’d like to introduce this towel to Orlovsky one day. I think they might become friends, and find their counterpoint in another being to not feel so alone in this cold, cold world.

The Portland Thorns, presented by Axl Rose

The Portland Thorns unveiled their new jerseys yesterday, and they’re definitely different:

These things are one revolver away from being a Guns N’ Roses shirt. They will make every player look like they have a chest-plate tattoo and bartend at a 4 a.m. bar where no amount of shots of whiskey seem to knock them off-stride while they tell you “Killed By Death” is the best Motorhead song (it is!). Can you tell I have a type? Which, anyway, makes them fan-fucking-tastic.

Clearly, the Thorns have been through enough garbage for a lifetime the past few years, and even with winning the league last year, they’re going to be sporting shirts that make it clear they had quite enough bullshit, thank you very much.