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A Hurtin’ from a Curtain

My shower curtain is equipped with a force field.

I realize that’s not an especially sane-sounding thing to say. Reading that, you might expect me to be the sort of person who checks the ‘matrix’ for deja vu glitches, or asks people to ‘use the Force’, or writes Trekkie fanfic in his spare time. In fact, I do none of these things.

(Deja vu creeps me out enough as it is, the ‘Force’ is for babies and Tatooine tarot readers, and when it comes to Star Trek, I wouldn’t know my ass from an Uhura in the ground.

“At this point, my money is on Beelzebub making snow angels and sipping hot chocolate before I come through, but hey — anything could happen.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I know who Tasha Yar was, and which nasty thing she did during the Enterprise series.

But that doesn’t make me a Trekkie. At worst, it makes me a Denise Crosby stalker. And I’m certainly not going to write about that. Good grief.)

Anyway, I’ve got no goofy delusions that my shower curtain can deflect laser cannons or photon torpedoes or anything like that. I harbor serious doubts that it could repel the Gou’ald, keep Dalek hordes at bay, or make the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs.

(Particularly because the parsec is a unit of distance, not of time. Also, because the shower curtain is an eight-foot-by-six-foot hunk of cotton.

If it were nylon, maybe we could talk. But cotton? Jedi, please.)

My science fiction dorkitude aside, there’s still something oddly force-fieldish about this curtain, and I’ll tell you why: when I’m outside the shower, I have all sorts of random thoughts. Some are mundane, some are disturbing, and some are possibly plans for that long-overdue PG-13 Tasha Yar fanfic the world has been holding its collective breath for. You don’t know; could be anything.

These thoughts, the outside-the-shower ones, I carry around with me, mulling over, discarding, forgetting and remembering, doing all the sorts of things that one normally does with one’s thoughts.

Meanwhile, there’s the time I spend inside the shower. And, as far as I can recollect, I have thoughts in there, too. I distinctly remember having thoughts in the shower. Good thoughts. Bad thoughts. Soggy thoughts. I just can’t remember what the hell any of them were, because as soon as I step out of said shower, and past the curtain:

*poof*

Gone.

I am absolutely physically unable to entertain any sort of notion, of any kind, in the interior of my shower, and then successfully exit the shower with that thought still in my brain. Can’t be done. Unpossible. A recent and maddening case in point:

I have been out of shampoo for over a week now. At least nine days, possibly more. And conceivably forever. The only evidence I have that I ever used my own shampoo is a hazy, shower curtain-diluted memory of rubbing something frothy into my hair. Might have been shampoo, might have been toothpaste. Could have been cappuccino, for all I know. I only vaguely remember lathering, rinsing and repeating; whether my head was then minty clean, or in need of cream and two lumps of sugar, I can’t say. It’s the damned shower curtain. I’m under its spell.

The second-worst part about this thought-wiping monstrosity is that it prevents me from actually finding shampoo to put into the shower for myself. I get into the shower, blissfully unaware that my shampoo is AWOL. I spend fifteen minutes cleaning myself up, chewing myself out, and toweling myself down, all the while resolving to grab a bottle of shampoo as soon as I leave the damned shower.

Then *sssssshhhhhppppttttt*, I open the curtain, step out into the bathroom, and… uh… what am I doing here again? Why am I naked? And wet? Is this one of those alien abductions I’ve heard about? And can we forgo the anal probe part of the program, please? Surely, you interstellar jackholes have caressed your share of colons by now. Buy an anatomy book, already. Jeez.

And so, I get dressed and go on my merry way for the next twenty-four hours, until I find myself back in the bathroom, soggy and soapy and suddenly enlightened, staring at the empty bit of shower shelf where my shampoo used to sit. And the circle of stupidity rolls on.

But yesterday morning, I finally found the answer.

First, I should mention that I’m only out of my shampoo in the shower. Luckily for me, my wife shares the facility, and so I do have a backup shampooing plan to fall back on. I wouldn’t want you to think I’ve been neglecting my hair care of late, thanks to this nefarious and diabolical shower curtain villain. Not at all. I’ve simply been ‘borrowing’ the missus’ shampoo, until such time as I remember to resupply my own.

Or until hell freezes over, whichever comes first. At this point, my money is on Beelzebub making snow angels and sipping hot chocolate before I come through, but hey — anything could happen.

And yesterday, I set destiny in motion. That morning, after forgetting — again — to bring shampoo to the shower, I resolved to remember, no matter what. Curtain be damned, I would somehow smuggle the thought of picking up shampoo from inside the shower to the outside world. And so, I wrote myself a message. On the shower wall. Using my wife’s shampoo. ‘REMEMBER TO PICK UP SHAMPOO‘, it read. Stretched all the way around the tub, too.

And did it help? Did I finally, mercifully remember to restock my supply?

No. Thirty seconds out of the shower, and I was busy dressing and brushing and rushing to work, heedless of the brilliant foamy note I’d left myself. Clueless doofus, thy name is Charlie.

Still, my plan did have the intended effect, in a way. Because now — thanks to my carefully scrawled message — now my wife is out of shampoo, too. And seemingly immune to the dastardly effects of the shower curtain, because when I checked this morning, there was a bright, shiny new bottle of her shampoo in the tub. Right next to a full bottle of mine. Seems the trick here is to find someone who has an attention span longer than your average hummingbird fart, and let them do your dirty work.

Thank goodness. I was just about to go at the shower curtain with a light saber or a flamethrower or something. That would have been even tougher to explain than how the walls got smeared with Aussie shampoo.

And only slightly easier to explain than why my head’s smelled like a flowery kangaroo pouch for the last fortnight or more. Either way, I blame the curtain. Or Darth Vader. Take your pick.