Darned Water

Hullo. I’m the local columnist whose carefully crafted words are the last thing your drowsy cockatiel sees every evening as he nods off on his little trapeze or whatever. My name is Jeff Wing, but since around third grade people have mis-addressed me as Jack Wayne, so feel free. Now, I don’t want to sound like a desiccated mummy murmuring through foul and ancient bandages (who does?), but my doctor tells me I need to drink more water; or any water, I guess. {a rasping sigh escapes the ghastly mummy-man with a sound like dried tamarind seeds rattling around an empty gourd}. It’s been difficult, particularly in a Western World where everyone is walking around with a clutched bottle of water. Do Idislike water? What a question. Hahaha! Haaaahahaha! Yes. 

What do I disklike about it? Hard to say. It is colorless, flavorless, odorless, and when you fling it into the face of a stranger the outcome leaves one wishing for a kinder  and gentler world – a world where one isn’t sometimes obliged to weave hurriedly through honking, stopped traffic in a panting attempt to escape a beatdown. Darned water. 

What memo did I miss? Asteroid? Blight? Invasion? End Times? Cormac McCarthyism? At a certain point in our recent cultural development people began walking around like the anxious survivors of a crashed mission to Mars. These water freaks skulk around the streets and shopping malls, hospital waiting rooms, weddings, parent-teacher conferences and emotionally racking death bed vigils with a little plastic bottle of water in hand. “I’m gonna miss you, cousin Pete! *takes swig of Hallstein Artesian* I’m really gonna glug-glug-glug! miss you!” 

Life, daily life, that is, has become a cheaply produced 1973 Tuesday Movie of the Week sci-fi thriller. It stars Richard Hatch, Kristoffer Tabori and an increasingly hairy-headed John Saxon. It is a small-budget cautionary tale written around commercial breaks for AeroWax (“Now with 50% more plastic. Ladies, we heard you!”) Salvo Tablets, Shake ‘n Bake, and Alka Seltzer. Then during the same whiplashing commercial break, ‘Now, instead of counting sheep, you can count upon a good night’s sleep, from Serta!’ – tousled bottle-blonde Joey Heatherton yells an off-key jingle next to a showroom bed while writhing suggestively in a painted-on knit jumper with flying nun lapels and deeply plunging neckline, costing this 13 year-old many many many nights of sleep, and every 7 days an aggregated 22 minutes or so of missed Tuesday Movie of the Week footage.

Oh, yeah. The movie of the Week. The film is mesmerizing once one hurriedly returns from the Heatherton Chamber (or ‘bathroom’ as my parents called it). Like all good cautionary TV fables of the seventies, the story transfixes with its all-too-plausible portrait of a future dystopia – usually the unlikely year 1997 or so –  which portrays an Earth whose ‘resources’ have been so denuded by Man’s greed (or Person’s greed, as Ms. Magazine would churlishly correct us all in the inevitable rejoinder) that the bland future-folk have to carry water in their hands all day, taking blank-faced metronomic swigs as they walk along, like self-oiling robots in a realm of the mechanized damned. 

I’ve even been lectured by my work colleague, Trent – a perennially cheery picture of health at whose behest I purchased a 40 oz. HydraGear container. [I assume the marketers meant “HydroGear” and only inadvertently invoked the many-armed nightmare invertebrate]. I picked this fluid receptable up on Trent’s recommendation and it is a rain barrel with a handle. Four of those a day and I’m set! If “set” means I become an undulating H.P. Lovecraft horror amoeba and am no longer recognizably a man (reader, please hold your cruel augmenting comment till the column has reached its conclusion). Trent will occasionally poke his head into my office to good-naturedly inquire “…are you drinking your water?” My health-conscious co-worker is right to be concerned and I often regret having screamed at him to “GET OUT!! OUT OUT OUT!!” Trent, thank you for caring, and I apologize for tearily pelting you with hurled office supplies.

shaddup

Can everyone shaddup about water? The astrophysicists are excited that Jupiter’s moon Ganymede has water and may support “Life As We Know It”. Shouldn’t someone warn those Ganymedian space protozoa that, if the evolutionary jack-in-the-box optimizes with the usual fervor, Life As We Know It will make of them a race of tentacular, bottle-clutching water obsessives? Something to look forward to. 

One is of course reminded that when the booze-themed fraternity hazings turned deadly and the campus Greeks were obliged to switch to a more benign initiation torment, their choice was water, which in sufficient quantity has also proven deadly. Though coma-exiting survivors of the initiation report extremely supple skin and healthier hair.  

The conventional physiological wisdom falls short. “We came from water and we are made of water. The human body is 60% water!” Like that makes sense as a reason to drink water? Both Joni Mitchell and Big Bang cosmology teach us that “we are stardust,” so I guess diving into the sun is doctor-recommended? How stupid do you think I am (a rhetorical question not intended as an open invitation to abuse)?

For now I will grudgingly continue this new water-sipping routine on the off-chance it makes me incrementally healthier/more magnetically attractive to passerby. The ironic fact that water is a diuretic has not helped in this regard and I have taken to wearing a full apron in public to conceal what the medical hotshots calls “crotch osmosis.”  Wish me well–hey HEY!  My eyes are up here, sport!