naked ladies in the shower

Oh, I am so gonna get the hits with that title and a lot of them will be Japanese guys at four in the a.m. CST and you know who you are.. I don't know who you are, we blog authors have no names, just times and locations of hits.  And if all this sounds racist, seriously, according to my stats I have a party of oriental interesteds coming at me in the wee hours and their referring URLs have strange names like stinky standing ashtray and naughty nancy nuggets.  What does that even mean, dude? There's no porn like Asian porn and they still won't get the juicy stuff out of me, but they keep checking back just in case I have a weak moment.  I may be misinterpreting all this due to my limited understanding of technology and my copy of Blogspot for Dummies has not yet arrived from Amazon. But hey guys, keep reading.

I am thinking about this while I swim and when I am finished I sprint downstairs to the locker room.  I need to shower because the chlorine crystallizes on my skin when dry and if I don't wash it off  the ride home is unbearable due to my steaming itchy skin.  And this is a college locker room which means group showers with no curtains and when you're nineteen and athletic you don't care, nudity only gets you good things in those early years..  Enter middle age and a comically, lumpy body stamped with varicose veins and stretch marks and those sagging buttock cheeks.  "Never, never look in the mirror when you're naked," says Susan.  Words to live by.

I tried showering in my swim suit but that's just stupid so off comes the suit, the dignity, the lies I tell myself about my body.  In walks a matron with bouffant red-tinted hair and well-applied cosmetics (in the pool?) and her sparkling earrings match her swim suit.  Swimming is a social event for her and she is one of the main talkers in the water walker club, trilling and chatting her group up with tales of buffet lines and sick relatives.  She never speaks to me.  For one thing I don't make eye contact, just a brief nod in her general direction, let me get on with my schedule.  But here I am with nothing between me and this glittery woman but shower droplets and suddenly she is all talky-cozy with me, grinning with those dental implants, surprising me with her familiarity and chumminess.  I guess nudity is vulnerability and accessibility and I am no longer the alpha swimmer in the lap lane and she just the mere waterwalker.  She is beginning to strip off her suit  and I am flashing to Jack Nicholson and Kathy Bates in the hot tub and this woman has the same look as Bates and I am outta here . . . -