Posthuman Blues

I'm up late doing laundry. There's something existentially reassuring about laundry, something earthy and cyclic and zen that speaks to the subconscious. We can launch probes to other planets, explore the subatomic "particle zoo," map the human genome . . . but we still have to do laundry. I don't think futurists of the 1950s thought we'd be doing laundry in 2004: much easier to drop your clothes into an ultrasonic cleaner. No detergent, no wrinkles, no static cling, no dryer lint.

But we're still doing laundry pretty much the way we always have. Laundry is exempt from the change the envelops and transforms the rest of waking reality; it's a temporal linchpin, an anchor to sanity. And if you're Zippy the Pinhead, it's also a religion.