i <3 showers

there's freedom in the routine, in being able to maneuver the turns and obstacles, knowing what to expect, what to avoid, when to hide or when to appear. maybe freedom is the wrong word.

i take a shower and after 10, 20, 30 minutes, sometimes i'll forget to shampoo my hair. sometimes i'll shampoo twice because i forgot i'd already done it. i'll step out of the shower and realize i hadn't put on any soap. once, when i started drying off, i heard the pop-pop of shampoo still cleaning my hair - i'd forgotten to rinse it off. i'm not being absent-minded. when i get in the shower, when the water turns on and rushes through the pipes and out the shower head, when it hits the ground like a jar of coins spilled onto the floor, except over and over again in a constant blur, something in my mind turns on that allows me to finally think. i get engrossed in these thoughts, which become as clear as day, or as obscure as night, or as trite as these long long sentences, and so inevitably the utility of the shower becomes the thought and not the shampoo or soap or whatever it is i forget to apply. cuz finally i'm free to think. it's the freedom of knowing that there's nowhere else to be but there, and nothing else to do but stand in heat. not that those things are bad, being places, doing things. but when i step into the shower, all of my expectations are met.

here in this cafe, i could always be doing more. i could be studying more, socializing more, being more perceptive or more introspective or more anything. i could be at home, at school, in bed, in a gym, in the shower, anywhere else but here. the freedom of choice is a bit too much, because i could be doing everything, yet i'm only doing this: typing, listening to music, drinking coffee. i'm doing those three things. i'm not doing everything else.

when someone asks me how i'm doing, i tell them. when someone asks me what i did that day, i tell them. i work well with these kinds of questions, ones that have answers. i work well with schedules that i can bend and shape, that i can maneuver and change. but this kind of freedom, the empty kind, is too much, the freedom to be nowhere at once, compared to the sad finite of here.

madvillian take me home. literally, home, not something more dramatic. the workers here have been staring at me for the past 15 minutes waiting for me to leave. adioz.