Shower Jerk City

I save my best writing for the shower. I know everybody does it, just like I know that everybody masturbates in the shower. Not me, though. I learned early on that carelessly-splattered ejaculate tends to hang around for a while. First you find a little drop on the faucet, and you get rid of it, and everything’s fine. Next thing you know you slip on a piece that somehow landed on the edge of the tub, then the soap becomes compromised and you start worrying about in the inside of the shampoo bottle, or your girlfriend’s pink razor. The only way to avoid this is to get it right down the drain at the first instant. Fuck that. I don’t have time to clean up so much junk, and worry that I got it all, and I hate wasting a good get-off by being so contientious with my aim.

But I do write in the shower. Specifically, I dictate to myself. Some people sing, I utter prose. And good prose, too, not the shabby stuff. This is a wasteful exercise, because I don’t get out of the shower until my thought is complete, and I end up using a lot of hot water. Also, because I never end up writing anything down afterwards. It wouldn’t do me much good. You can’t transcribe stream of conciousness after the fact, but it does hurt to have lost such original beauty. The best I can hope for is sometimes the ideas linger and I can wrestle something out of the episode.

It was cold this morning, and I had to struggle out of bed. Each day I take an informal inventory of the situation. When did I shave last and was I using a sharp razor…Can I get away with not shaving this morning? Do I have to take a shit? When was the last time I noticed two matching socks in my sock drawer? A bad answer isnt the end of the world; if I don’t have matching socks I simply wear my black boots over whatever I can find. Do I need to bring the diaper bag with me this morning, and which car am I driving? Is there lunch to make? Is there something to eat for breakfast? Then I count back from 9 o’clock to make sure I’m leaving enough but not too much time to get to work. How many minutes I have to tick back from my arrival time depends on the answers to those questions. To make it easy, I figure 10 minutes each to shower and dress, and then add five if I have to shave, another five for lunch, breakfast, searching harder for socks, and preparing the diaper bag.

I’ve been getting nosebleeds again lately and this throws the whole thing in the trash. A 10 minute shower easily becomes 20 if my nose starts bleeding in there, which is usually what happens. If that’s the case, I have to reevaluate the rest of my tasks. Hopefully I had time in there for a shave and making my lunch, which I can eliminate if necessary. But if not, I really have to get dressed fast and pass cars by driving on the shoulder in order to get to work on time. I have to get to work on time because I’m such a prick about demanding that my managers get there on time, too.

I did pretty well this morning. Luckily it hadnt started snowing yet, so I didn’t have to clean off the car. My keys and wallet and watch were right where I wanted them to be, and my nose didn’t bleed in the shower. Everything was going nicely, but somehow in my waking haze I misjudged something, added or subtracted wrong, and I ended up two hours late, stumbling into a design launch conference call, smelling like liquor and scratching like a monkey. Something had gone terribly wrong but I didn’t have time to think about it. I told my secretary to type out notes from the meeting and give them to me later and I went into my office and closed the door. I turned up the music on my computer, surfed for porn, went into the bathroom, jerked off into the toilet, and was back home and in bed by noon, trying to figure out how to work the turntable. I was jonesing for some Dylan on vinyl, so I spent the time needed to figure it out, despite my apparent intoxication, and put on Desire.

Four hours later I woke up on the floor to the tick tick shishing of the needle repeating its last groove. The dog was licking my face. I went upstairs to do the laundry. Tomorrow, there definitely needs to be some new and matching socks waiting for me.

- posted by seanmh @ 9:16 AM