I dunno, maybe I'm all wet...

Every morning I take a shower. Not just because I want to be nice to be near, but even more because if I don't, my hair (what there is left) stands out in all directions and flatly refuses to lie flat. This gives me the "gray hedgehog" appearance that reminds me of Dagwood, or even worse, of a porcupine in full fright.

Every morning, I find myself singing little snippets of whatever I can remember of songs from various artists. I have read that the reason we sing in the shower is that as the water droplets are forced through the shower head, they create negative ions much in the way that waves crashing upon a beach result in a freshness that you can feel in the air. You can't help yourself. You feel like singing!

Of course, another reason may be the acoustics. The shower produces white noise, which muffles the whiny overtones in my morning voice, and convinces me that I could have had a career in the music industry if only I could have vanquished the stage fright.

Last week, it was Stompin' Tom Connors. More particularly, it was the lines:
"Tonight I'm due to bushwhack Sue
And take her to the Gumboot Cloggeroo
And do a little gumboot cloggin' (repeat 3)"

This week, Joni Mitchell :
"Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
You pave paradise, put up a parking lot."

You might think it would more thematically appropriate to sing something like "Singin' in the Rain" or "Gonna wash that man right outta my hair". But you'd be wrong. Why? Because I don't decide consciously what to sing. It just happens, the way dreams happen.

I don't choose what I sing with this in mind. Like dreams, the mental pictures come to me, and I respond to them, not even knowing why I sing what I sing, or even why I sing.

It would be interesting to hear the songs that emanate from other people's shower stalls, if this theory has any substance to it, and then compare their selections with how they coped with their day.

I think the Stompin' Tom song may have been calibrating some purpose or goal that I wanted to accomplish that day, but since I don't remember which day it was, my theory remains unproven.

The Joni Mitchell is different. I had seen her on YouTube a couple of days back, and the lines I quoted above were apparently the ones that stuck with me.

Perhaps it was a reflection that as an Old Guy My Age, I'm not maybe quite as appreciative of people as you might think I should be for an Old Guy My Age. That thought percolated for a couple of days until it suddenly popped out on the Morning Shower Mantra Show.

So if there's anything to it, I plan to listen to my musical selections with a little more intention. Who knows? Someday I might be vocalizing a refrain from the Moody Blues , like:

"I've decided to do what I can and to find the kind of man I really am."

And then maybe that very same day, I'll find me!

Footnote: Do dreams have a purpose?

To sleep, perchance to dream

Every fall in Alaska the grizzlies gather along the McNeil River to participate in a banquet that they probably call "The Fillet Fest". We've all seen it on TV. Big brown bears, gorging on salmon until they can't hold any more. Soon, they go to sleep for the winter, except for the ones that can't sleep because it's too warm.

I guess I'm like that. When I go to sleep, it's usually after I've had my fill of fruits and vegetables and nuts and berries. And then I'll hibernate from about 11:30 p.m. until about 3:30 a.m. when I awake because the electric blanket is too warm. It was too cold when I started.

I think what I'm gonna try is one of those timers that lets you set multiple hours for on and off. In other words, crank the thing on at 11:00, and off at midnight. Then on at 1:00 and off at 2:00. Maybe that intermittence would cure or at least confuse whatever is in my body thermostat that makes me fluctuate into wakefulness.

Maybe if I dreamed I was a bear, watching for salmon and scooping them out and chowing down on them until I could hold no more, I'd sleep through the night, just like they sleep through the winter. But I've never been able to program my dreams. Some people can do this, and others remember (and many recount) every detail. I can't. Besides, I don't like sushi.

I think the dreams that matter are the ones you have when you are awake. They're the ones about which you can consciously say, "I have a dream..." rather than "I dreamed..."