Why I Dread The Shower

I'm the fastest freakin' showerer in the world. My showering needs are few: I wash my stubble of hair, soap up everything that potentially shows dirt or generates odor, and count on the Trickle Down Theory (which works much better for showers than it does for economics) to take care of the rest.

So I spend maybe 2 minutes in the shower each day, which is handy, since we have a water heater about the size of a thimble. And yet, some of the most memorable moments of my life happen when I'm naked, dripping water, and least prepared to deal with them. In lieu of having anything meaningful to talk about, I'll share a few of them.

Several years ago I managed to make it out of the shower, but was still naked and wrapped in a towel, when I heard the mewing of newborn kittens. I found them in the closet. Carrie's moron cat had gotten up onto the top closet shelf to give birth to her kittens. I climbed up on a box to get a look at them and realized that they were conjoined siblings.

Fuck!

While I was peeking up at them on the shelf, several other people crammed themselves into the closet with me and my towel for a look-see. On the bright side, it turned out the kittens weren't really conjoined (or siamese siblings, for the un-PC among us), the mama cat had cleverly manage to tangle all the kittens's umbilical cords together with the placenta and wrap the whole mess around both the babies and herself. The cords were wrapped around her left upper forearm and all three kitten's heads and torsos, and dried into leather. Her forearm was hugely swollen and the tangle of kittens were bound to it and each other so tightly that they couldn't move and I couldn't separate them, and she bit me several times when I tried.

So I kicked everyone out of the closet, put on some clothes, climbed back onto my box and lifted down the whole clump of snarling cat, kittens and placenta and set it on our bed for Lori and I to examine in the light. There were several obvious problems: The cat was beyond pissed off about her sore arm, and me moving her babies, and her painfully swollen nipples caused by her inability to nurse them, due to them being wrapped around her arm like a Walkman. So I took a little pair of scissors and nipped away the strands of cord attaching her arm to the bundle of kittens. She took off like she was shot out of a cannon.

Next, after determining that there were three kittens, or at least three heads, we tried to figure out how to separate them. I had visions of nipping at a piece of cord and accidentally eviscerating one of them, which would have caused me to spend the rest of my life in therapy to heal from the trauma.

The cords were so tight that I couldn't even get a finger between them and the cats, so I started making small cuts in places that, I hoped, were far enough from any vital organs that if I screwed up and cut one of them, we'd both survive.

Eventually, we figured out a strategy, one small cut at a time, and got them separated. However, I firmly believe that these cats, which probably weren't blessed with overly high IQs to begin with, managed to dumb-down even further from oxygen deprivation in those first few hours of life. Unless you're a Republican, in which case their lives began at conception, probably in a ditch behind the Circle K.

So...That's shower story #1.

#2 took place a few nights ago. I was just getting out of the shower. I pulled my towel off the hook and was drying my face when Lori came into the bathroom and said, "Ummm...Ev? Can you come out here? Quick? Sage killed a possum."

I threw on my jammies and indeed, there was a soaking wet grinning Sage, and a soaking wet crumpled ball of dead possum on the deck with his tongue lolling and his glassy eyes staring off into space. This, by the way, was my first view into a possum's mouth. Who knew they had such sharp pointy teeth?

Okay...I'm not good with dead things. In spite of the fact that I'm in the dead-thing business, my dead things normally come in parts, which makes it easier to pretend they're something other than pieces of other humans. This was an entire dead possum. There was no option of pretending it was a standing rib roast or a hunk of Tofurkey.

So I decided that the best course of action was to scoop the possum onto a shovel and throw it onto the burn pile that had conveniently been burning in the yard all day, then go back into the house and watch CSI, drink a lot of beer, and pretend this was someone else's life. Me and my shovelful of dead possum, with his head hanging over the side, walked around the house. I slung him into the middle of the fire, and he bounced against a log and immediately rolled back out. Just as I was getting ready to scoop him back up for another throw he got up and ran off into the woods.

Now I understand the phrase "Playing possum."

We've done a little research, and it turns out that a dead possum isn't really a dead possum until it stays dead for four hours. Until then, cremate at your own risk.

Huh. Who knew?

My third story is the naked job interview, but I'll save that for another time when I have nothing to talk about.