The Sacred Shower Sequence

All is lost to the sands of time but the water of thy shower. Cause then you’d have time mud.

Quotemeonthisyphus

Listen. I know the speed of the internet. (It’s, like, 12 Mb/s over here.) This article will soon be buried and lost beneath the all-consuming dunes of time. Few will lay eyes on it, but you, you are one of those few. And you, too, will be lost eventually.

Don’t despair though, my friend! Consider instead; isn’t it romantic? How many oracles have proclaimed that there is nothing new under the sun?* In an age where it seems that all the world has been explored long before we entered it, the internet is our new wilderness. These virtual rabbit holes are the pirate treasures we bury and hide links to in abandoned comment sections for the curious and bored of the next generation to find.

Today, my intention was to deepen an existing hole. To make this article point to a piece I found many a year ago that I doubt anyone else has spent a single thought or click on since. I wanted, in the distant future, for some digital archaeologist to dig up my creative remains and find my skeleton eternally frozen in the process of examining another, even older skeleton. What an image.

And that’s not all! I wouldn’t have let my means, however poetic, lead to measly ends. What I intended to bury was not the shoebox-with-a-note-in-it type of treasure. No no, the bottom of this rabbit hole would have held a true gem. Alas, this digital world isn’t any more immune to the erosive tendencies of time than the physical one it is embedded in.

I have searched the netlands far and wide, googled incessantly, and scoured with scrutiny tomes of ancient bookmarks, as passed down from an elder incarnation of my beloved incendiary vulpine (sung of in legends). But to no avail! It seems the artifact has long been washed away by the turn of temporal tides, sort of like the skyscrapers falling into the ocean in that one scene from the movie Inception.**

Know that when I attempt to replenish the watery wisdom of the original, it is with grief for elegance lost that I cannot recreate. Hear ye, one and all:

  • Start your showers cold. Besides testing your willpower, cold water wakes you (and your cardiovascular system) up real quick. As far as I remember, the original article went all the way back to Spartan warriors and Shaolin monks to make this point. It was nice.
  • For the main part, use warm water. Aside from rewarding you for your toughness, it opens up your pores for cleaning products (and microplastics, yey).
  • End your showers cold. Wakes you up again, if you still need it, and closes your pores back up so your skin stays clean longer. Also, the air around you won’t feel cold when you step out of the shower. I think the original called it the “batman suit effect” or something like that, but I might have read that somewhere else.

This is the lesson I aim to teach. Be cold water, then hot water, then cold water, my friend!


* J(d)k.

** Which is still a really great movie. Almost… timeless.

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