Vomit Comet

There’s a guy in our building who loves him some techno music. He loves it so much in fact that while I was putting the final touches on that last post at about 3 minutes to 7, he started listening to it, loudly! Loudly enough that the floor underneath my feet is vibrating in time with whatever song he’s playing. Surprisingly, there hasn’t been any gunfire yet. If somebody kills him, and somebody probably should and not just because he likes techno music, I’ll let you know.

I’m convinced that my shower doesn’t want me to live here anymore and that it’s been doing everything in it’s power to get me so pissed off that I’ll just say screw it and move out.

It all started out gradually with the odd temperature switch without warning, a pretty standard shower thing to do. I took no notice. Then it started doing it more than it had been but again, I just figured it was the time of day that I was using it and the number of other people in the building who were doing the same thing putting a demand on the water supply that it was having a hard time keeping up with. Again, no notice taken and no hard feelings. The shower was doing the best it could to keep me clean. But after awhile I started to notice something. Actually 2 things. For one thing, the drastic changes in water temperature were starting to get more extreme, and to top it off, time of day stopped becoming an issue. Whether I hopped in the shower first thing in the morning or late at night, it would pull the same shit. There I’d be, washing my hair or standing under the thing to rinse off in the perfect stream of water that I’d set for myself and boom, I’d either fry or freeze. I’d also scream, which indirectly brought something else to my attention.

Now as I’ve mentioned, up to this point I was trying to be accepting and understanding of the bathroom implement so as not to cause any friction between us because let’s face it, we needed each other, and both for the same reason. In return for keeping me clean, I’d do the same for it. But there comes a time when respect has to be tossed aside and for me, that time came at the exact moment when both of the people I lived with at the time looked at me like I was retarded when I complained about how weird the shower was acting. Once they both said that nothing like that had ever happened to them even after they’d gone in after me, that was it. The gauntlet was thrown down. This was war. The son of a bitch shower must have seen things the same way because the climate changing assault on my personage intensified at around the same time as I was set to make my formal declaration. The shower had trumped me again.

Realizing that this was not a war that I would be able to win I decided to take another approach, that being reasoning with it. So the next time I took a shower I decided to have a man to nozzle talk with it to see if we couldn’t get to the heart of the problem and sort out our differences. The shower however had other ideas and all my reasonable dialogue got me was a blast of water cold enough to flash freeze a penguin.

So with the battle lines clearly drawn, I started responding the only way I knew how, by cursing at it and childishly kicking it when I went into the bathroom. It didn’t teach the sonofabitch a goddamn thing but it made me feel slightly better to know that I had my own form of revenge, small as it was. We went on for months this way the shower and I, and it seemed that we had reached a stalemate and that tensions had reached their peak and were now levelling off. That is, until yesterday afternoon.

Looking back on it, I should have known something was up. The shower was being uncharacteristically kind to me. The water stayed at pretty much the same temperature all the way through, and it was so pleasant in fact that I began thinking that maybe it had had a change of heart and was ready to put all of this pettiness behind us. But any dreams I had of negotiating a ceasefire were shattered when the shower pulled from it’s bag of tricks what could best be described as it’s own WMD.

As I turned around to rinse myself off, my foot started to slip out from under me. The shower was trying to throw me out! I quickly tried to grab for something to steady myself but to no avail. I did however manage to buy myself enough time to not fall down and give myself one last chance at balance. I had to twist around to grab at the window sill which up to that second I thought would be responsible for my shattered face. Fortunately, I managed to counter it’s attack and stay standing but not without suffering aggravating personal injury. For as I contorted my body in the name of staying upright and unharmed, I felt something pull in my back. I don’t know what it was but man did it hurt, and man does it still hurt now. But although I hurt myself I was proud of the fact that I had managed to avert certain disaster and that the full force of the ambush was not to be realized. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the complexity of the shower’s plan.

Though simple enough on the surface, the depth of what the shower had accomplished was stunning, especially for a metallic inanimate object. For even though things failed to go exactly as planned since I didn’t actually fall out of the tub, or even fall down, I still got hurt, and I got hurt in an area that would make my life difficult. The immediate back pain made cleaning the house, which I was planning to do after the shower all but impossible and out of the question. Even leaning over to take a CD out of my computer was more exertion than I was prepared for.

And things only got worse at bed time. I started out on my back so as to give it some support and hopefully stop the pain, or at least lessen it. This worked for awhile until I noticed that everything was stiffening up the longer I stayed in that position. Sleeping on my stomach is just not an option, I have no idea how people do that. I couldn’t sleep on my sides because when I did it just made my back hurt more. So, utterly defeated, I resigned myself to a pretty much sleepless night, which it was since I’ve been awake since 3:30 this morning unable to lay down for long periods of time.

So now here I sit, in pain and exhausted in my computer chair, realizing that I’ve been beaten in the game of psychological warfare by a fucking bathtub. And just what makes me so sure that I’ve been beaten? Well, eventually I’m going to need to clean myself up, and putting heat on my back is something I’m going to have to do sooner than later. And where do you figure I’m gonna have to go to accomplish these things?

So if a lot of time passes and you don’t hear from me, ask Matt where you can send the get well cards.