Someday I will post the photo that started all the lavamatic/matique business. It’s the old-fashioned non-digital sort. It hails from an afternoon of doing our laundry in Barcelona, a stray dog asleep on the linoleum in front of a mustard-colored front-loader as we sipped fantas and watched a telenovella that resembled 90210 with the locals. Somehow it became emblematic of that month-long trip through europe.. a sense of feeling totally at home in a foreign environment, or realizing that nothing is really all that foreign after all (admittedly this was Western Europe and not Jakarta, but still). Just like the African guy I peeled oranges with on the train, just like the woman whose baby burped in J’s ear on a park bench and made us all jump. Without language we were connected nonetheless by these human gestures. I think the lavamatic also connotes for J & I that sense of “throw a bunch of shit in there and take it for a spin,” dotdotdot the creative process,. All of this is to say that when we see any manifestation of “lavar” in the “semioshpere” it’s a tickle, and so another missed photo op because the camera’s on the fritz or I just didn’t have it on me, driving behind a filthy truck on which someone had scrawled “lavame.”