* Reader advisory: You may envision Dan McNee nude over the course of this opinion piece.
Now that I’ve scared off 96 (100?) per cent of my readers, I have to come clean on something. Pun heavily intended. The night of Friday, Jan. 14 marked my first shower of 2022. Not out of choice really, more a representation of present circumstances.
I should also point out that I’ve had a few baths leading up to my breaking of the ‘new year shower seal.’ I don’t have an option in the matter these days; when construction of our addition began around Labour Day weekend, it meant that our primary main floor bathroom avec shower was going to be sheared off, and for the next few months we would be relegated to the upstairs tub.
Initially I didn’t think it would be too bad. I don’t mind a bath, especially during the winter months. It can be cozy and relaxing, 20 minutes of serenity after the tykes go down for the night. That said, I don’t want to have a soak every single time I need to wash.
“Sitting in a tepid pool of your own filth,” as Cosmo Kramer once elegantly described a bath on Seinfeld. He’s not wrong. My non-shower streak had actually extended back before the turn of the calendar into mid-December.
Without getting too vivid, the moment of realization that I was long overdue for one came when I was having a tub last week, and I noticed that the water had become particularly murky. How did I allow myself to get this heinous? my inner monologue pondered. It took a bit to register, but after a few minutes of watching that surrounding pool get blacker and blacker, it finally kicked in. The new black socks I received for Christmas were displaying themselves after detaching from my feet. That did it.
Thanks to an extremely generous gesture, we’ve been able to utilize our neighbour’s shower largely whenever we like, but I still feel fairly uncomfortable imposing myself in this way. However, when they happen to leave town for the weekend, I’m all over it like black dye on Dan’s feet.
Last Friday’s shower easily cracked the top-five lifetime for me (I’ll refrain from listing the others). It was long, it was hot, and by the end I actually felt completely clean. With a custom Spotify playlist ripping along on random, I was belting out tunes like it was 2007 again and I was on stage with the boys in my former band. Albeit a very different setlist. Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al” was the encore this time around. I hope you can never listen to that song again without picturing yours truly in the raw. I am truly sorry.
It goes without saying that the loss of our shower (also having no dryer with two young children in the house has also been taxing) over the past few months has been the most difficult aspect of our renovation. Looking at it that way, I suppose it hasn’t been too bad. But rest assured, once our new facilities are up and fully operational it will be a very, very long time before I willingly opt for the tub.
Singing in the bath just doesn’t have the same feel to it.
“If you be my bodyguard,
I can be your long lost pal;
I can call you Betty,
And Betty when you call me you can call me Al…”
Once again, I am truly sorry about that visual.
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you back here in a fortnight.
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This is a bi-weekly opinion column; for question or comment, contact Dan McNee at dmcnee@midwesternnewspapers.com.
