Shower Time

Took a perfect shower this morning.

And yet, are there any bad showers?

I suppose wedding showers and baby showers are god's punishment for sex, but they don't necessarily count, considering there's no actual hot water being used to baptize your pre-expired corpse.

And they probably have to call them "showers" just to add some positive spin on what would otherwise be a pretty dismal use of your time from 11:00am to 2:00pm., which if you're not at work, and there's no football on, legally, you should be napping.

I guess baby showers and wedding showers aren't all that bad. I mean, it's just another excuse for eating, drinking and opening up presents.

I think what I hate worst about those events, and this is terrible, but because I'm so terrible at meeting new people, I find that I feel really uncomfortable spending time with my friends' friends' friends.

Now I love my friends. Like, step in front of a bullet to save, kind of love. And for the most part, my friends' friends are my friends too, which is what we call a win-win. And, I must say, that I have pretty impeccable taste in friends, who also have impeccable taste in friends, so the odds are actually pretty good that my friends' friends are gonna be just as delightful as my friends are, and can slide into the Trivial Pursuit Game with relative ease. Eat, drink, open presents.

But gatherings like baby showers and office barbecues tend to invite the kind of secondary and tertiary friend crowd that completely ruin the intimate nature of spending time with your friends and turn the party into a casual Thunderdome, where everyone enters and everyone leaves, but someone is going to exiled from Bartertown for acting like Mel Gibson at a DUI checkpoint.

And it's a shame. There is nothing more awkward than meeting new people, so one would think that there would be a mutually agreed upon level of forgiveness, but no, someone is going to say something, or do something that is going to totally ruin the evening for you and you're gonna stew about it the entire way home.

You're a lucky man if your wife agrees with you, and you both decide never to go to that Memorial Day Pot Luck at your brother-in-law's condo ever again.

Then you take a shower.

Speaking of showers, I took a perfect shower today.

The kind of shower that reminds you that life isn't all that bad.

Showers are kind of like food in the fact that the further away you've been from them, the better they are.

Or something like that.

Let's just say I was getting pretty ripe.

Not, like, French ripe, but it had been a few days.

And I'd been sick.

Not cold or flu sick.

Backache sick.

The worst kind of sick.

I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. (My wife always wakes up and asks me where I'm going, as if there is more than one answer to that question, "Look to the east at the dawn of the third day" I tell her.) So as I eased back down into the bed, with one little twist, and every muscle from my diaphragm to my butt crack seized up like I was bracing for impact.

I was fine as long as I lay on my side and didn't move.

A full night's sleep and I should be good to go.

And nope.

Got up the next morning, or more precisely, meant to get up the next morning and I was frustratingly still in agony.

Being ill sucks, but there is nothing quite like chronic back pain.

Gotta broken arm, here let me fix that. Give it a month and you'll be right as rain.

Gotta bad back, here is a list of agonizing exercises, muscle relaxers, anti-infammatories, antidepressants, and a pamphlet on alcoholism. Some days you'll be in agony, but that will be better than the days where you're terrified and borderline suicidal. And please consider taking this group course on chronic pain, cause we can't fix you, but we can certainly introduce you to other people.

But those are my problems, I was talking about showers.

So after a long time of not moving, not changing cloths, not being able to properly wipe my butt, I was able to move about the cabin this morning and the first thing I wanted to do was to shower.

The water, the heat, the steam, the smell of soap and the scrape of the razor.

You step out of the cubicle of bliss and into the new world, fresh as a daisy

Maybe that's the key to meeting new people.

Maybe the romans had it almost right.

Instead of bath houses, we should have showers in showers. Eat, drink, open presents, with loofahs and shaving cream. Meet people at their best and pinkest.

There is no facade when your dirties are dangling.

But that's a dream for another generation. All I'm saying is that showers are little Utopias and a little Utopia goes a long way.