It’s a trivia question that flummoxes many: What was the first year of the 20th century? On an episode of “Jeopardy” every single contestant guessed “1900.” THe correct answer is “1901.” The year 1900 is not considered the first year of the 20th century because centuries start with year 1. 1900 is the last year of the 19th century.
So am I on day 1 or day 2? Yesterday would have been neither. Yesterday would have been day 0. Today is day 1. Sleep was especially adventurousness. My left arm felt pins and bites of soreness, I suspect for a conglomerate of reasons. Shoulder pain from the messenger bag. SOmething to do with a possible heart attack. Atrophy from a lot of resting on that elbow during breaks betweem last year’s sex rumpuses. And years before, I might add. Sex and my violent sleeps have led to many mornings waking up with sore shoulder and neck. It’s why I spend a good length of time blasting hot water on that area in the shower each day. Explain that to the forensic researchers who will one day comb my corpus of shower recordings for its unique window into the real world of human bathing. They will ask “why does he spend so much time blasting water onto his shoulder?” and they will be rewarded with a blunt, chunky answer that contributes little to their goal of understanding, through forensic research, the ways means and habits of one of society’s most personal rituals. I would think more people would be willing to let themselves be watched showering than they would be watched pooping or masturbating. But showering remains pretty much a closed-door-leave-me-alone-routine, similar to the aforementioned rituals. When talking about forensic analysis of bathing I think you’d have to consider porn as part of your research material. One time after reading an article by a physician about the body parts men do not wash I was impressed by her inclusion of our legs. We men are more inclined to let the soap and shampoo drizzle down our bodies and assume this is enough to cleans your legs but it’s not enough. We must wash and scrub our legs as vigorously as we do our pits and crotches. Not long after reading this I happened across a porn I’d watched many times over the years, in which a woman in a large bathtub sucks off a faceless, dick-only dude who appears tubside. As he approaches she completes her bathring ritual with, what else, scrubbing her legs and feet clean with a good amount of soap. Men don’t do that. I started doing it after my decision to start sitting in the shower, one of the best and most transformative changes to my diurnal routine I can ever remember. Sitting in the bath makes proximity to extremities much easier and my legs are as clean as they’ve ever been. I guess. I never did a filth test for my legs before making this change to my bath routine but I have to believe it’s true.
This is the last three days of my shit splift era at this job. Split shift. That’s when you work 2 days with a day off, then 3 days with a day off. I took it begrudgingly, in the spirit of the abusive relationship to which I am both unconsciously vulnerable and well-aware of my tendency to even create abusive situations where they would not necessarily exist. Much of the enmity that this job creates is, I know, amplified by my own creeping crud of anxiety and poor self-esteem. Not one single day has passed at this job where I did not expect to be fired upon arrival. I found some hand-written notes from last year in which I expressed surprise that my ID wasn’t cancelled and I was allowed to enter the premises. This anxiety goes back to the first days of being here, and to what I knew of the job long before even applying for it — that it is a high turnover churn machine where no employee is valued more than any other. This place thrives on firing people.
Enough of that. The 24-hour webcam is back on YouTube after an unusual blip in the almost continuous streaming of that camera for probably 3 or 4 years. One of the few things that could know it out occurred: a power outage affecting only the building in which I live. It happened while I was taking an late-day shower, so only barely noticed it, since I shower in the dark. The light of the cell phone, plugged into a battery, more or less shielded from the darkerning of the hallway outside the bathroom door. At some point, though, I did note the darkness, and remember how earlier in that day an upstairs neighbor passing in the hall asked if my electricity was working. It was. I asked if he’d flipped the switches in the fuse box. He said he did. I was heading out for what ended up being a 17,000 step trek about midtown. He said that most of his lights were back on but one room was not. I wonder if he, like I would discover later, had a SMART plug or outlet like I do, a device which is so smart that when the lights go out the device defaults to staying turned off when the lights come back on. That happened with me, and it was a project to remember that being the case because the SMART switch is stuffed behind a bookcase, which fortunately made it relatively easy to just move the books out of the way and tap the power button on the SMART switch. But it did take a few minutes of trying to remember what the p iano and the TV and the new mini-PC are actually plugged into.
17,398 steps yesterday. The new maps app makes sharing the map of my track more complicated than I can manage right now. I used to share my maps with pride.
