“Heavenly Ablutions Of The Third Kind”

VazamBam

by Vassilis Zambaras

“Regimen against Ennui”

1.

I know this sounds trite but

Before you call it just
Another day,

Leave two galvanized
Pails full of water overnight

Under the stars,
Then hit the hay.

2.

Get up

At the crack of dawn,
Go straightaway out

And

As you gaze up at the stars
Being washed away,

Empty the pails in turn over
Your still numb stark-naked body.

You are now clearly
And fully ready

To greet a brand-new day.

MELIGALAS, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—3/29/10—How many clichés do you mindlessly utter every day? How many have you heard, how many will you hear rolling off the lips of others till your dying day? Myriads. As common as cicadas in the heat of a long summer day. You hear their incessant thrumming from early morning up to long after dusk and soon it becomes something your ears are accustomed to hearing every day. (Now, if I can just squeeze in three more—make that two now—“days” in this article, I might win the Weekly Hubris’s weekly weakest cliché contest.) But in the meantime, tell me—who on Earth needs another poem brimming with two bucketfuls of watered-down clichés?

Nobody I know, but perhaps some parched soul out there thirsting for enlightenment in the vast heavenly expanses of the World Wide Web may benefit from the simple, daily hydro-therapeutic routine described in this poem. Though hydrotherapy is nothing new “under the stars” —even Hippocrates prescribed bathing in spring water for those suffering from illness—I doubt if this particular regimen is well-known; I first heard about it from a mystic physical therapist born in Khyrgyzstan.

Though I’d been fervently taking showers for over 30 years by finishing off with cold water after a hot one and have almost never come down with a serious cold, this therapeutic Asiatic spirit took me one step beyond by telling me my ablutions would benefit from extraterrestrial effluences in the form of nocturnal energy overspilling from the heavens into galvanized buckets strategically placed so as to receive maximum doses of intergalactic run-over!

This was about three years ago, when the therapist came to Meligalas with a friend of ours who has a house just down the street but who works in Athens and whom we see whenever he can get down to the boondocks.

This particular escape was over the three-day Clean Monday weekend and, while the therapist and I were in our kitchen savoring Eleni’s gastronomical tidbits and washing them down with sloshes of fiery tsipouro, the conversation turned to more spiritual matters. Besides discussing these, we also learned that he was the favorite physical therapist of many well-heeled Athenians and had also made a number of appearances on various morning TV talk shows, where he wowed the viewers by demonstrating his therapeutic talents on volunteers severely afflicted with a variety of aches and pains.

When I heard this, my first thought was that he might be an Asian snake-oil pitchman, and I kept waiting for the pitch, but it never came. Instead of a spiel, he told us about a wise old mountain man he had spent some time with in Khyrgyzstan and how one of the things he recommended for universal well-being was a daily early morning dousing with two bucketfuls of heavenly-irradiated water blessed overnight by a panoply of alien spirits.

I swallowed this story hook, line and sinker and took my baptismal plunge a few days later.