The Trophy Wine
The Dornbracht Shower System

Where was the bathroom? In here – through the bedroom, maybe... The bed was made with what must have been brand-new heavy-weight Lyocell sheets. Aka Eucalyptus and bamboo plant fibres.

Pretty nice. No doubt about it. ...And thick thick and deep real wool fibre carpets.

What if I didn’t want to go wherever she wanted to take me? What if I just wanted to stay here and go to sleep till maybe next summer or thereabouts.

Jesus, what was this – this bathroom set-up!

This was German technology. I knew of it. Hadn’t ever actually experienced it quite like this before.

Who used this place usually, I wondered. Couldn’t have been anyone ‘standard’ from the firm. DuPont execs are about the only other people who have this kind of set-up wherever they were staying over a handful of nights.

Sensory Sky Shower. It said...

‘Rain shadow’ setting. ‘Standard rain curtain.’ ‘Essence Injection’ to the water... ‘Mist.’ Coloured mist.

Three showering experiences pre-programmed: ‘Re-adjust, Release, and Rejoice.’

And chroma-therapy lighting.

He he he he he.

O-kay.

Funny thing was, as much as my normal attitude would have been to take all my day clothes off and chuck them all over the floor everywhere just to be ‘an idiot’ like the woman had said, and indeed like I mostly was generally – quite intentionally, of course – I had this sudden impulse now to disrobe but slowly and carefully, folding things up properly and laying them all neatly on top of places.

Frikkin’ Germans. Must have been their designer engineers and architects transmitting their whole mindset and philosophy of living into their equipment and installations and through those out to me standing in here now. Completely alone. No one physically standing there influencing me, no ‘mother,’ no ‘father,’ no censorious actual person.

Just the equipment.

And the water.

I turned on the water and tested the settings and the digital ‘buttons’ and everything. Was all really responsive. Quickly responsive.

You had to love the warm steam mist. With the ‘essences infusions’ or injections or whatever they called it.

And then the so-called ‘chroma-therapy’ which went with it all.

I could actually get this pale lilac-coloured glowing mist coming down on me and drifting around.

The strong green was an effect that went with this tropical rainforest scent-infused water...

But I liked the lilac.

That was where I was at right now. No kind of ’up there and at ‘em’ energy for me!

Not right now. Was more like a stay and do nothing kind of... ...lack of energy.

Somewhere along the way now though I had begun to lose the sense of absolute tiredness and this was being replaced by a calm lassitude and positive sense of relaxation for sure.

There was no doubt that this place, this whole set-up was having a positive influence on my sense of well-being.

Yet even so I did still consciously know that down there in the streets below, was the existential normal world and all of its very many problems – the homelessness, the fantasies of material wealth and the fictions about capital values that were going on in the world everywhere today, not just in the officially sanctioned financial markets.

The ‘normal’ world.

But of what, was it a ‘normal’ expression?

Of humans? Was that it? Were humans fundamentally flawed and so all of their institutions and ideas and thinking ever-fated to be fractured in the end, because once given into the hands of the ordinary, even the genius-level thing at one moment is destroyed inevitably at some other moment?

I would like to say that with the flowing of the water these thoughts just flowed away but that isn’t what happened.

They were made clear.

It was the ‘normal’ world in fact that was responsible for an accretion of lies layered on top of actual real-world problems: rules would resolve errant behaviour, ‘rules-based’ created a structure of solutions (it didn’t), governments ‘ran’ things, markets made things and funded them, and science knew everything so it could fix anything.

...And billionaires were better businesspeople and smarter than you or me. Unless you happen to be a billionaire of course, and then certainly you don’t need anyone like me to help you feel better about your life or show you what you should be doing or how to be happy. You are already happy!

Not that I am setting myself up to pretend to be able to do that kind of thing for anyone anyway. That is a Bono thing, or a Sadhguru thing. Right?

There are, apart from the public philosophers and psychologists, those large-scale commercial institutions who do that sort of thing anyway for bookable taxable profit, and academics who have major professorships and who are all very successful at it, to say nothing of the massive SSRI industry.

Yes. Oh yes. The world has the whole thing tapped.

That is if you believed the evident topology of the obtaining political and social power structures everywhere which were all built on their own genius capacity for deceit.

Meanwhile, the conditioned water rained down, the essences infused the air and the coloured steam, the lighting, slowly lost its designer drama effect on me -, and I noticed the thick white Nile cotton towels on their heated racks.

I got out of the ‘MEM water environment’ and the system water flow program turned itself off, but the bathroom lights themselves were still down very low. The towel rail was lit up though.

Not really sure how I felt exactly.

Different, that’s for certain.

‘MEM’ – the German manufacturer’s name for the whole thing, was supposed to mean ‘The Self’ in Esperanto. Not that I knew all that much in terms of actual words in Esperanto: it was simply what the company’s marketing literature said and that was all contained in a waterproof folder on top of the single long brushed-steel side-cabinet in the shower area.

Lovely lovely, thick, extra-length towels.

So that was all pretty good and that...

Could do with some coffee.

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