Sunday, February 1

my shower

Oh, sweet shower. My retreat, my refuge. Drowning out the incessant complaints, the continual queries. They stop at your doors, my protector from punks. There is so much you give me. So much more than simply time and a (very) little space.

My shower.


You know me so well, you fresh fellow. The acrobatic contortions required to wash my hair without knocking out the plastic doors have given me new flexibility, brought so much awareness. And I've never experienced such intimacy with a shower, usually so stiffly standoffish, never reaching out, never touching, as I attend to my knees, my feet...



And as your spray of water refreshes my face, I quietly contemplate the horizon of death. Perhaps death by water heater. Crushed in this plastic coffin when the two hundred year old iron tresses finally succumb to the weight for which they were not designed to bare. Weakened by the last decades of heat and steam, unforeseen. Or perhaps electrocution as condensation covertly connects the flooded basin, along the walls, to the so conveniently located 22o V socket.

And passing through your plastic doors, through the baptismal waters that have flooded the bathroom floor, I'm new. The whole world is sparkling new.


For some reason, this post is dedicated to Pearl.

12 comments:

  1. Haha great post!

    That heater does look dangerously close to the head of the showeree (yeah, I just invented that word).

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  2. This is great! One of my favorite things about traveling is seeing what sort of bathroom "conveniences" we'll have. Once in Italy, the shower was just a sloped floor that led to a drain. The shower head was over the toilet basin so that you had to straddle or sit while you showered. No such thing as avoiding washing your hair while you showered, and straddled!

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  3. Wow. Your shower is almost as small as mine here in the houseboat!

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  4. You certainly described the shower succinctly, making us feel what you were going through, especially at the end with the analogy to a plastic coffin.

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  5. My husband has been known to ban me from using dangerous holiday showers in far-flung places - I wonder if yours would qualify!

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  6. I've missed your blog since my internet stopped working!

    My shower is my entire bathroom - they don't do stalls in Korea, sadly. Makes for some damp feet if you wander in in your socks absentmindedly later.

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  7. I'm now shuddering with claustrophobia.... We, on the other end of the bath spectrum, have a shower over the-world's-oldest-hot-tub. A fiberglass monster that could easily seat 4 obese swingers, we choose the more conservative route of letting the grandkids "swim" in it. It is the single thing my husband loves best about our house!

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  8. It's always nice to see how wonderful things are in another country.

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  9. Anonymous1:36 PM

    I guess I should be thankful for my two-person sized shower even though it is from the '80's.

    Although your shower is small, you made it sound very sensual. I think I'll go have a cigarette now :)

    Great post.

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  10. My friend used to live in a place that had the tiniest shower. Every time she bent over to shave her legs or pick something up, her ass hit the door, flinging it open. It was hilarious. Best wishes on not getting electrocuted!

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  11. Your comments make me smile. It seems I've given an adequate picture of the shower... a place I love to hide in despite how much it sucks... as some of you have pointed out, it could always be worse, right?

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...and you may ask yourself, well...how did I get here?