Let me talk to you about bathrooms. I’ve talked about them before. Let me onto the floor again. The cold, tile floor most likely. We have encountered many a bathroom – from the tiny, tiny afterthought of a water closet hidden away at one end of Chris’ house in Savannah, GA, to the horrific Octojohn in Kerrville TX, heated by their semi-transparent clear roofs to the point that the air is something you can unfortunately taste, chew, and swallow.
In Providence, RI I bent over at the wrong time and received a shower brush in an orifice for my troubles… In Owings Mills, MD the shower curtain thinks nothing of moving in closer, closer, and finally embracing you in its cold, clammy embrace… In Belleville, IL the eyes of parrots follow your movement’s every move… In Loveland, CO the water pressure could strip the skin off your body and exfoliation is quite, quite unneccessary… in Charlotte, NC you have to convince the water to rinse your shampoo away, cause if you’re not awful nice to it, it’s going to be very, very casual about coming out of the faucet… in Wilmington NC you’ll be lucky if the whole damned construction doesn’t come falling down and you have to use a capo to clamp the pipes back into places (Schubb, obviously not a Kaiser!) and in California PA, not only do they not have any hot water, but they have a strange drain that flips rather than pulls or plugs, and I once spent 15 minutes shivering and wet trying to figure out how to make the water go down without calling for help. It was not a good day.
I remember trying to stand upright in a shower in Pennsylvania only to bump my head against the showerhead. Kneeling in the shower just feels like you’re about to be executed, so I spend my time there in a difficult semi-crouch rinsing with rapidity as the water rises around my ankles.
Heather and I are very…”civilized” when it comes to any sort of even-close-to-nudity around one another, so it says a lot that back in Charlotte, the battle to figure out HOW to make the shower GO involved Heather standing in a towel and my scratching my head, pulling, pushing, prodding and unscrewing multiple parts of the hardware to know avail. Eventually we had to call our host at work.
And the shower here in Concord… it’s shaped for a woman’s body. One who walks like a model. It’s weird curvy interior forces the ankles together and hugs the hourglass form. I on the otherhand keep knocking my parts against smooth wetness in unexpected places. Oh, and then halfway through the shower, all the steam condenses into cold water on the ceiling of the shower unit and starts drrrripping drop by cold drop onto the top of my scalp…. oh what adventures we have!
