Baptism by Fire
There is no better hard reset than a flesh-rending shower.
Heat. Energy in its purest form. Heat is power. Heat is action. Heat is what transforms wheat into bread, iron into tools, oil into fuel. It is an essential element of creation.
It stands to reason, therefore, that there is a direct correlation between how hot my last shower was and how good I am at my job.
Case in point: Yes, I did come up with this topic in the shower. But in a way, it came up with itself. Today sucked, and I still have this very article to figure out before I can go to bed tonight. (No, I wasn’t procrastinating. I was, uh, drafted.) But I knew whatever I came up with in that state wouldn’t be very funny. I needed a reset.
What is that reset? It depends. For men, it’s the simple act of taking your sweaty socks off. But for women, it’s almost unanimously a searing, scorching hot shower. I’m talking, like, OSHA noncompliance hot. Like war flashbacks for lobsters hot. Hot enough to deglaze a hard day off your bones, along with whatever skin you’re not using.
Why this is such a distinctly woman thing, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s our genetic predisposition to being burned at the stake? That would explain our mystical ability to gently tweak the shower knob to that perfect spot where you no longer know the difference between steam and sweat, where the water can scour your very thoughts.
If you know, you know. If you don’t, you’ve likely been the victim of someone who does.
My partner is one such victim. He takes “normal” showers with “tolerable” temperatures like a “well-adjusted” human being. “Hot water is too painful,” he says, as if that’s not the point. “This is just going to make you feel colder when you get out,” he says, as if I didn’t make it so hot that stepping out into the cold world is a relief. And of course, when his back hurts, the tune changes; now the water can’t be hot enough. On some level, he knows the truth.
I think that’s part of why he wanted to replace our old water heater (sometimes called a hot water heater by people who are wrong) with a tankless one, a so-called “on demand” water heater—a bit of a gamble considering the numerous negative reviews we heard about them. But all those negatives were from up north, where ground water is cold. Here in Florida, where there’s no such thing as cold, we thought it stood a better chance.
Anyway, long story short, this article is secretly a love letter to my tankless water heater. It’s about the size of a medicine cabinet, and it produces truly infinite, truly hot water. Hot enough that I have to occasionally turn it down. If my creative tools, things like paper and electronics, weren’t so incompatible with showers, it might be impossible to get me out.
But you can’t rightly say you’ve “started fresh” if you never got started, can you? That’s the funny thing—the healing power of the shower can only begin once it ends.
