Being the creative type that I am, I write, make photos, make digital art, draw when the mood strikes me, have all these ideas about all kinds of cool stuff. But of late I have been struck my inspiration while in the shower. I know that there have been silly inventions like waterproof pens and pads for jotting down those great shower ideas, but that seems a bit much. These are mainly little blog ideas, little rants about one thing or another that I think would be kind of cool to prattle on about for a few paragraphs. But then, well, I get out of the shower and they are gone like the steam fogging the mirror and only a vague remembrance remains.
So instead of writing one of those boffo ideas that I no longer have, I am on about showers.
The wife is not a shower person, she likes a long hot bath, which seems to be what most women like. A shower might be a more manly thing in that is there to get the job done and get on with the busy life that men lead. Or women I suppose. There must be a study somewhere about men and women taking showers and how working people tend to take more showers than stay at home people. But that would just be a guess.
For the first few years of my life I lived in a run down old house that had a claw-footed bathtub left over from the twenties. Might be worth something now a days, but likely not. It was a large tub,the kind that you could fill with water up to the overflow drain and completely submerge yourself with no trouble whatsoever. Of course, if the water was really hot, ah that was the good stuff. Of course, a really hot bath tended to leave you a bit lethargic, as a football announcer might say. But it did feel good at the time.
Now I am more the shower type, unless I am staying at a motel with a hot tub in the room, then I am back to the deep soak and the pounding water in all the right places. Speaking of pounding water, I like those shower heads with the pulsing, throbbing, massaging settings. The giant rain forest type heads that let water kind of fall on you from the sky are just not my thing at all. Neither, need I say, as the water savers that a lot of motels use to cut down on water usage. Being misted like an orchid is no fun and not a time saver as you need to stand there for twenty minutes rinsing off.
My humble home has a good sized hot water heater and I take as long a shower as I like and use all the hot water I can stand. There are few things more shocking life than finding no hot water on cold morning, which happens more often than I like in busy motels. Yes, I tend to stay at the cheap places, thank you very much.
Still, this whole obsession with wetting our bodies all over is still a bit a recent fad and there are a lot of places in the world, like Mexico and India, where it is not really all popular today. For my two cents worth there should be a free shower system for the homeless just so the rest of us don’t have to hold our breath as we walk by them.
But I really did want delve into any deep and meaningful social issues. Not that I normally do anyway. I was just thinking how nice it is to be clean and have hot water whenever I want it. I used to read Leo Buscaglia and he had some story about meeting the richest man in a village in Africa, he was rich because he had a cement floor, while everyone else had dirt.
Maybe having hot water doesn’t make me rich, but it does make me feel pretty good. Even if I do tend to forget all those brilliant ideas once I dry off.
