Write Club: Showers

Write Club is a Chicago-based event where writers are pitted against each other (it’s friendlier than that sounds) to perform a 7-minute written piece inspired by one word. I competed this past Wednesday night, so thought I’d share my piece. The introduction works a little better spoken vs. read, so just know that when I write show-ers it’s pronounced as in “the greatest show on earth.” Another bit of context important for the piece: winners receive a tiny trophy called the loving cup of deathless fucking glory.

This…this is embarrassing. Deeply, deeply embarrassing. Showers. Of course it’s showers versus flowers. The other way didn’t even roll off the tongue.

Showers.

Not Show-ers, like I originally thought. Not show-ers vs flow-ers, which isn’t even the expression, Adi. Showers.

Well, this piece might land a little differently, I guess. Maybe give it time to grow on you.

Don’t worry, you won’t have to groan at me for 7 minutes, that was a bit. Very convincing I’m sure. I thought about committing to it for longer than I care to admit, and knowing write club audiences, 7 minutes of dick jokes probably would have secured me the loving cup of deathless fucking glory, but alas, I couldn’t rise to the occasion.

Let’s talk about showers!

A picture which makes it seem like I was killing it.

I do this thing when I’m done showering. I grab my towel and bring it into the shower with me, sliding the door or the curtain shut because at some point in school a teacher told me condensation makes it warmer in the shower than the colder bathroom air, and I’ve never forgotten that. Or I made it up and have told myself that story so many times it now feels true. Brains are weird.

For as long as I can remember, once I have wrapped the towel around myself in the shower I start gently biting on the towel’s threads and let my mind wander. Though that’s an overly romantic term: my mind usually just goes to the same five or six locations. Food, bad dick jokes, errands or the tedious crushing weight of responsibilities, convoluted analogies, story ideas, of which one subset is off-genre sequels no one asked for to movies that should be left alone (example: Truman Show 2, a courtroom drama where Truman is suing Ed Harris’s studio for emotional damages).

Sometimes I pull on the threads, unraveling the towel the slightest bit. Not on purpose. It’s a tic, of sorts. A habit implanted long ago.

I wonder if this habit began around the time when I may or may not have heard about condensation warming the inside of the shower, giving me more idle time to let thoughts in. Or maybe in high school, lazy and letting the towel do the work of drying while I thought about a crush, or a fresh unfortunate spattering of acne, or how quickly I could get dressed in order to eat again or masturbate again, my two most crucial activities at age 16. Sometimes I had snippets of stories floating around in my brain, and I pursued them the way one does a butterfly. With clumsy awe, and tenderness, and almost no success. Mostly I considered the strangeness of the world I was growing up in and how hungry I was.

Sometimes though, I would get what I have only recently taken to calling The Dread. It’s not a panic attack, just a temporary and intensive focus on my own mortality. One such moment was instigated by seeing the length of my shin in a mirror and suddenly becoming so aware that I am housed in a body, one which I know will one day be gone. I can almost conjure the sensation of oblivion, and it is like watching my atoms float away on the wind like bubbles. I have this mad desire to reach out and capture the bubbles and shove them back in the bottle, as if that’s achievable.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fairly healthy this happens to me. For one, it provides plenty of fodder for my write club performances, which I keep telling myself don’t have to be about death or dick jokes, but here we are again.

I don’t love The Dread in the moment, but I think I’m a happier person for it. Better equipped to handle whatever comes my way that isn’t…you know, death itself.

I know how to control The Dread these days. I learned long ago, thankfully, and maybe that’s why it comes less often these days.

If at the start of this performance about showers and growers you were guessing I’d use the phrase “comes less often these days” congrats. Your math was probably off, but you arrived at the right answer.

The trick to establishing boundaries with the overbearing relative that is The Dread is to think of your thoughts as threads on a towel, and The Dread is just one of them. Biting the threads is fine, natural, almost encouraged…okay, convoluted analogy, the towel thing is not natural, it’s weird, but it’s still fine. You just have to learn to not unravel the thread. Or to unravel it with a sense of control. Bite and pull at the thread to the point of satisfaction but not so much that you will be left towel-less. By all means chew, just don’t use your fangs. Know that if the thread starts to comes too undone, if you start chasing bubbles, all you have to do is hop over somewhere else. Pick at some new thread.

This is nothing new to you if you’ve been to therapy, or watched a television show written by writers who went to therapy…or, perhaps, from the general modern zeitgeist we’ve reached thanks to enough people having gone to therapy for society to have made it past a sort of therapy tipping point and now those of us who get our therapy from literature or film or self-expression in a room full of mostly strangers and a few friends (hello, you!), get to reap the benefits without having to call insurance a hundred times to find an in-network provider in our area.

Rather than trying to put the bubbles back in the bottle, you have some options. You can recall those acne-spattered high school days and those self-indulgent, incredibly water-wasteful twenty minute showers. The pink, scuffed boombox you’d bring into the bathroom to listen to Bright Eyes or the Garden State soundtrack, choices which basically guaranteed thoughts about mortality or eventually naming a feeling The Dread. Chase that thread and remember the bulky binder full of mixed CDs that you’d have to use to keep the boom box’s busted CD reader shut, one of which was a compilation of Irish punk songs that you played almost daily in your sophomore art class because no one else ever remembered to bring music with them until the teacher faced almost certain mutiny if the class was subjected to one more goddamn Flogging Molly song.

Follow the tangents of memory, marveling at the brain’s capacity to conjure up the past. Or the future, too. Fantasize! Come up with a rom com Saving Private Ryan 2, I dunno. You don’t have to be a teen taking a twenty-minute shower to make the future, the past, the present bend to your will.

I suppose my brain, most brains, I’d venture, are not, in the end, to the chagrin of my joke’s set-up, showers. They do not instantly reveal their worth, are not simply the first Dreadful thread your teeth land on. On first glance, our brains are primitive beings struggling to grapple with mortality. But they are, in fact, growers. Enormous, luxurious, five-star hotel towels, with a nearly infinite spread of threads to unravel and play with.

Which is perhaps the kind of statement made only by an annoyingly neurotypical person, but I’ve never claimed to be anything else.

Whether passively drying in the possibly slightly warmer condensated-air inside a shower, chewing on a towel or laying in bed late at night unable to sleep, glancing at ourselves in the mirror, whenever the dread of mortality shows itself, those universes are there, ready for us to pick at threads, to dive into our past, fantasize, analogize, come up with a dick-joke-adjacent premise to talk about death on stage.

Death-less cup of glory my ass!