A shower memory.

~ Hetty Eliot
Spinning thinking emoji

(This has nothing to do with SepSceneWriMo)

People love to brag about their “shower thoughts” to the world, which to me seem to be random, pedestrian thoughts mistakenly perceived to be profound by the thinker. Sort of analogous to singing in the shower.

Anyways, in my case when I’m in the shower, I get memory flashes of things that make me want to plug up the drain with my hair and take a long nap.

This one isn’t embarrassing, just amusing. It happened several years ago.

I just started my day at work and was getting papers ready on my desk.

A manager comes in shortly after and says, “What was that about in the parking lot?”

“What happened?”

“You cut me off!”

“I what?”

“You cut me off in the parking lot!”

I straighten my stack of papers and lay them down. “I cut YOU off?”

“Yeah!”

“That’s amazing, because I don’t drive.”

His smug look faded. “Oh. Well, they looked like you…” and he walked off.

I know the imagination often plays tricks on us. We catch a glimpse of one thing and our mind generates an image that upon a closer look, doesn’t in the least resemble what we thought we saw. Like when you think you see a friend in a crowd and it turns out to be someone who looks nothing like them.

My question is: what is it about me that made it so plausible that I would cut someone off in a parking lot that his brain filled me in as the driver?

And now that I think about it–I was once accused of running a stop sign somewhere in my city that I don’t even go!

Saddest part is, when I did drive years ago, I was a terrible driver anyway.

47 thoughts on “A shower memory.”

  2. I had a client who bragged to. me that he and his wife had come home from their charismatic/evangelical church (yeah, those people) and grounded both their teenage daughters for a month. Not for anything they’d done, but for what they’d possibly done and hadn’t been caught possibly doing. True. I said “How enlightened of you.” He took it as a compliment. Sarcasm for some requires an obvious barb.

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  3. “…pedestrian thoughts mistakenly perceived to be profound by the thinker…” In the shower? Nah. Not me. Used to be while drinking or smoking…but I don’t do those anymore. My latest profound thought after much meditation: Changing the overused term “Sheeple” to “Creeple” to more accurately describe some people. How’s that for deep?

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    2. There’s a dumb forum on Reddit entitled “Shower Thoughts,” though I am not encouraging you to check it out. I like that term “Creeple,” Lord knows there are too many of those floating around.

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      1. Thanks for the feedback on “creeple…” I may use it soon. As far as Redditt, way too adolescent these days…the pee-pee, poo-poo penis, titties posts are taking over the entire forum. And conspiracies. Everything is a conspiracy. And suicidal unemployed young people living in their Mom’s basement. Like, yeah, I really need all that in my life.

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            1. Do I *literally* believe in it? No. But I would like explanations for the missing Fruit of the Loom cornucopia and why BerenstEIN Bears is somehow magically spelled BerenstAIN Bears now. And why everyone remembers Ed McMahon, including the man himself, showing up at people’s houses with balloons and a giant check from Publisher’s Clearing House when apparently he never worked for them.

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              1. The latest one, in case you missed it, is the Scarecrow in “Wizard of Oz” is carrying a gun. There’s even a “film clip…” But those can easily be faked with CGI, etc. Weird shit. And YOU have been prolific lately!

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    1. That’s funny. I might start doing that when things get dull. Or, just grab someone’s jacket and say, “Is that my jacket?? I said you could BORROW it, not HAVE it.” Stuff like that.

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        1. Yeah. There was one time I needed someone to move some heavy boxes of copy paper, and when he came in I asked him, “Ya feeling strong today?” and he goes, “Oh, so you can tell I work out?” And I was like, “Um… you talk about going to the gym every single day.”

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  7. Egads! Doppelgängers 😳😳. That is a synchronicity that can be explained by quantum string theory but that would just muck up this witty exposé of your life experiences. I like the idea of clogging the drain with hair and taking a long nap. That is a vivid picture in my mind that’s probably going to stay for a while. I have often solved some of my most complex problems on the toilet, while sound asleep, or waking up in the shower when the hot water finally goes cold. I can’t understand why I can’t problem solve with grand psychological powers of prescience at a more appropriate time.

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    1. I think the brain continues to work on problems when we’re not actively thinking about it. It’s like when you can’t think of certain lyrics and then four months later you break out into song. But the ideas always seem to come when you can’t write them down. Which sucks because in my case I know they’ll be gone by the time I find a notebook.

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      1. Ha haha 😂! I definitely can’t remember long enough to write it down. If I snatch my phone up to type a note or take a voice message, the only thing that gets recorded is me asking myself why I’m holding my phone in the middle of the night.

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          1. You are one of us, the elite souls that keep everything stored in inaccessible memory to avoid our best thoughts from being pilfered or corrupted by others. When my subconscious remembers the combination to the secret room, I have a field day of uninvited internal bloviations.

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  8. First, that manager sounds like he has an ego problem, much like the ministers of the government of India.

    Second, I never have any creative shower thoughts, much as they are touted as a creative time where the flashbulb can go off in your brain. Instead, most of my creative thoughts comes in my sleep.

    Naturally, the next thing is to do is to filter them.

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    1. Hey, whatever works! Crazy stuff can happen in a dream. Like, I dunno, NOT HAVING PANTS ON WHEN YOU GO TO WORK AND EVERYONE IS WALKING BY AND YOU CAN’T REMEMBER YOUR ALARM CODE. Not that anybody put that idea in my head, of course.

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  9. We’re in a drought so I hop in and out and don’t have time for thoughts! When I traveled through the upper Midwest, people were always thinking I was someone’s cousin or girlfriend – so I guess a lot of people look like me.

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  10. To be fair, shower thoughts are a thing because our mind does make its most interesting connections when we don’t need to think. So walking, working out, bathing, and doing the dishes are prime time for shower thoughts. Maybe this is my shower thought to you. Ha.

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