The Water Glutton

For someone who cares about the environment, I spend way too much time in the shower. My parents rag on me about it all the time. "Maybe instead of recycling you should just shoot for taking a shower in under 30 minutes. There's plenty of plastic, but not potable water." I couldn't agree more, quite frankly. It is really quite selfish to sit there pouring hundreds of soapy gallons down the drain while somewhere off in Africa, there's a pot bellied kid with ashen skin wishing he had a single gallon to drink in a week. Not that a lack of showering on my part would put water to the parched lips of some tragic face on a Trinity Broadcasting Station commercial, but the whole concept is grotesque the way gluttony is. Water glutton. That's me.

The thing of it is, a nice long shower for me is about as good as a $300 session with a high end shrink for an upper middle class white business man. I like to crank the hot water up until it's just barely uncomfortable, until all of my capillaries are dilated and my white, white anglo flesh is red like a boiled lobster. When the water pounds down on my back at that temperature, all of the hairs on my arms stand on end like I'm freezing, like my body can't tell hot from cold anymore. My sinuses clear out in the first minute, my muscles relax until I'm worried I'll piss myself, and if I scrub hard with my fingernails, that first layer of old, dead skin sloughs right off. Sometimes when I get out, there is steam rising off of my flesh and I'm lightheaded with a fever - that's exactly how hot I like it.

The heat is really just the secondary effect of the desired one though. What's important about the heat is that the whole room fogs up. Dense, hot, whirling mist, clouding up the windows and the curtains and hell, even the tile. I like to get it so thick that if I turn the lights off (and I always do) and squint my eyes, I can't tell if there is a foot between me and the curtain, or a mile. Like I'm alone in avoid, surrounded by endless omnipresent nothing. I don't think of stupid things like, "can nothing actually be omnipresent?" when all I can hear is the water thundering down, slapping against my flesh, and all I can see is a haze. I don't even bother scrubbing at that point; I just turn my face to the water, close my eyes, and listen. I blank out everything until I'm just a hot, nebulous void myself.

Like the dirt and sweat and sebaceous secretions, the shower washes my thoughts away. It drowns the demons. When I'm grinding shampoo into my scalp, wrinkling my nose at the strong scent that is always supposed to be something like "lavender" but always smells like "chemical cocktail," that alone is all I am thinking about. Shearing short, black, bristly hairs from my leg - the five-o-clock shadow of my shins - turns into a surgical procedure demanding of my rapt attention, the world drowned out by the faint scrape of a sharp blade on soft flesh. I don't think I'd even notice my toes if I didn't scrub them meticulously, examining them like a broken VCR, trying to figure out what angle I should take if I want to work the waterlogged sock fuzz from under my big toenail. So single-minded is my focus that I sometimes wonder if I shouldn't figure out a way to do my homework or writing in the shower.

And lo - I'm not in the shower right this instant, which is probably why I'm instead spilling verbal diarrhea across this page. My mind is racing with thoughts of the cages I need to clean, the floors I need to vacuum, the classes I need to attend tonight, and ah - probably a shower later too, right?