Shampoo and shower thoughts

This morning, while having a conversation with Sid, my stalwart shower spider companion, it occurred to me that I have been using the same bottle of shampoo for a suspiciously long time.

As if a team of elves are hard at work every Tuesday night putting just enough soap back in the bottle to get me through the rest of the week.

Like most guys, I am not particularly fussy about my hair care regime. I have my Buick-sized bottle of combination shampoo/conditioner/degreaser/paint thinner and carburetor cleaner. With my hairline steadily creeping toward the back of my head, I suppose I could use more products to attempt to increase the volume of hair I have, but that seems like a losing battle.

My dear and loving wife has a whole shelf of bottles for hair needs depending on the day of the week, the season, how long it has been since she has been to see a stylist or if the moon is in the 7th House and Jupiter is aligned with Mars.

I know of these, because I routinely send all the bottles flying when attempting to grab the back scrubby thing which is also precariously perched with them.

This often leaves me blindly scrambling to retrieve the bottles while soap is creeping ever closer to my eyes.

Now that you have that vision in your head you will likely never be able to eat again, or will need an extra old fashioned with your fish fry this week. My apologies in either case.

Getting back to my main point, I noticed awhile back that I was beginning to run low on my shampoo and like a responsible adult added it to a shopping list and bought a replacement vat-sized bottle. Said bottle, is sitting in the cabinet next to the stockpile of enough gauze pads and first aid supplies to survive a small insurgency. We can’t forget that Wisconsin is a border state and with maple syrup industry projected to grow from $1.08 billion this year to $1.52 billion by 2028, it is only a matter of time before the sticky-fingered Canadian maple barons attempt a hostile takeover.

Yes, I know, I am wandering again and you are wondering how I am going to tie this back to my shampoo bottle being mostly empty and ideally end it with some life lesson that will make you want to clip this column out and post it on your refrigerator. Well, at this point, I am wondering that too.

As any guy will tell you, there are stages of shampoo bottles being “empty” — from having to shake it in order to dislodge the shampoo much as you would a bottle of ketchup, to adding a bit of water to the bottle to dilute and wash out what remains clinging to the sides. Meanwhile, your spouse has noticed the bottle being mostly empty and has also purchased a new bottle during her grocery trip, so there are two bottles within a few feet of the shower and you stubbornly attempt to scrape every molecule of shampoo from the bottle as if it were the last drop on earth.

What? You don’t do that? It’s only me? Well, work with me here for a minute, I’ve got maybe another 100 words to wrap this up into something to justify why you have read to this point.

Stepping out of the shower, there are many times in our lives where we stubbornly struggle to force every drop out of something beyond the point of reason whether it is in our jobs, relationships or tough choices we need to make. Despite new options being only an arm’s length away, we are so stuck to the status quo that we will avoid the short period of discomfort or potential embarrassment at any cost. We would sooner deal with a cluttered shelf of nearly empty bottles and the faded promise that each brought than start fresh.

I really need to replace the bottle of shampoo in my shower.

Maybe I will do that tomorrow.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.