Archimedes solved, it is said, engineering problems in his bathtub. At least he solved one specific problem, though I infer from the story that he did his best thinking while in over his head in hot water. For I too utilize steaminess in the service of mental prehensility. Being less well versed in the mathematical arts, I prefer running water, but the function is surely the same: In the shower I am a peerless poet, an inventor of all needful things, a playwright, a philosopher, an abundant lover of all those who require affection and understanding. I can win wars, or prevent them. There are no secrets of creation that can be kept from me: Better than the greatest physicist, I understand the structure and unfolding of the universe; more than the most learnéd theologian, I know its meaning.

Naturally, I thought of these things while under a calefacient spray; if my musings now seem incoherent and blathering, that is due to the corruption of exsiccation. I do have my day job, after all. Eventually, I towel off, and the brilliant and cogent resolvings that would have salved a troubled world evaporate, or sluice down the drain to diffuse and dilute into the turbid liquescence of the municipal sewers—the whole process alchemically transmuting, as it were, white water into gray matter, then white matter into gray water.

I very much fret and stew about unwatered humanity. Sometimes I think it would be best if conference rooms—especially those used by generals, diplomats, cabinet ministers, school principals, and other high officials—were built as institutional calderas. But this is a “dry” thought. In the first place, there is sure to be an aesthetic objection: Few of our colleagues, frankly, have the necessary, uh, charisma to gain inspirational stature in bathing situations. But the main rap on this line of musing is a more pragmatic one. The whole point of business convocations is to exploit the delicate (or indelicate) interplay of cooperation and competition essential to workplace primacy. That is to say, hierarchical, or differential dominance is crucial. While discussing a workgroup’s project under warm, wet conditions may indeed enhance cooperation, if all participants become equally smarter, the arms race of internecine rivalry merely gets jacked up to a new level. But if I, say, can jump a notch relative to you….

…Think what a statement that would make! The middle-management sycophants, parched and Saharan and in their expensive, constricting Armanis, forced to behold the physical and rhetorical éclat of the be-steamed Boss, the latter cutting through dusty clouds of sere, etiolated, and pithless thinking with a saberous spue of wit! (Post-shower, the now noetically flaccid executive can retire to the privacy of his or her office for a quiet, clean, and well-deserved break from trenchant cognitive afflati, leaving the plan’s actual implementation to the envious unwashed.)

And yet, the prospect of drought concerns the survivalist in me greatly. Should the draw on the aquifers of our nation require regulation such that profligate soakers become outlawed, only outlaws will have access to performance-enhancing spritzers, and the entire structure of society will become desiccated and, thus, endangered. Wetness will become the supreme black market currency—but one affordable only by the very rich—for intelligence is power, hot water the sodden gray eminence behind the throne.

…Outlaws, then, and the wealthiest liege lords. In the dynamics of fluxion, an affluence that reduces incrassately will devolve toward feudalism: the pleasures of the few riding on the labors of the many. Is this to be, then, the future of our society, of our world? No! Such a thing is not for me! They’ll have to pry my aspergillum from my cold, dry hands.