My wife and I recently bought a house in the country where she has one of her dental practices.  Most houses in Australia fall into one of two categories.  They are either new, art deco pieces of crap the likes you’d see in Miami without the Cuban color palette or 85 years old with tin roofs and brick walls.

Our house falls into the second category.  It’s old, grows cob webs, and is nestled into a jungle-like yard and garden.

We have one bathroom in our new house, which is just great when my wife decides that she wants to spend an hour on the loo, browsing the Internet and chatting with her family.  Are you catching my sarcasm?  Cause I’m laying it on pretty thick.

The one bathroom thing is not exactly true.  The house is actually old enough that its got a largely ignored and disused outdoor toilet adjoined to the back porch, as well.  It doesn’t flush, so I just pick a spot near our annoying neighbor’s fence when my wife has monopolized the crapper for her eBay browsing.

Plus, its an added bonus that my dog Bingo gets confused when there are competitive markings in his territory.

But that’s not what I want to write about in this article, though clearly its a topic that is emotional for me.  Instead, I want to talk about the forty year old shower that I have to endure each day.  There are two knobs that control hot and cold water.  The hot water knob is simple.  Turn it on and within half a rotation you’re getting the maximum heat power.  You can turn it twenty more times and nothing is going to change.  Our hot water heater is strong like a Soviet boxer and cranks out scalding hot water on demand.  Excellent, I have no complaints there at all.

My problem is completely centered on the treacherous cold water knob.  When I get ready to shower, I crank on the hot water and then brush my teeth, shave, scratch my butt, whatever while I’m waiting for it to get hot.  Then I slowly adjust the temperature of the cascading stream for a steamy, relaxing comfortable shower using the cold water knob.

The real conundrum is that within 1mm of turning distance the cold water knob either gives you an ice bath, completing dominating the hot water … or its non-existent and you’re being showered with napalm.  The sensitivity of the knob is so acutely small that I nearly just place my hand on it and the temperature adjusts 10 degrees.

Within that infinitismally small range is shangra-la with Hoth and Hell on either end of the spectrum.  What’s worse is that sometimes when I find the perfect spot after minutes of minute adjustments, the slightest torque on the knob will pull it back fractionally one way or the other.  I’ve had to leap out of my shower like a autistic paratrooper to avoid getting second degree burns all over my back.

All I can think is what if everything had this slim a margin of success or failure?  What if victory was a 1 out of a 1000 opportunity and absolute, complete failure, misery, and death was the other 999 times.  I call this the Knobber where the modest fruits of a mild victory are compared to results of defeat, which are exponentially worse that the best winning scenario.

I tried to think of some examples to compare this to:

• Baseball: The lead-off batter in the fourth inning of the Cactus League.  His team is up by 1 run and he’s at the plate.  The Good: The batter hits a single and takes first base.  The Bad: The batter hits a pop-up and is out.  The Knobber: The umpire and catcher knife the batter in the back in a suprise ninja ambush.
• Politics: It’s the year 1999 and the next US president is being determined by counting chads in Dade County, Florida potentially dividing the local and national community along political, economic, and racial lines.  The Good: Al Gore wins and we avoid the Iraq war.  The Bad: George W. Bush wins and here we are when we’re seriously considering Sarah Palin as potential Vice President.  The Knobber: A largely unknown legislative loophole gives the White House to a newly rebuilt, cyborg Adolf Hitler.
• Climate Change: Global warming is threatening the planet as icebergs melt, tropical storms increase, and boring documentaries are highly lauded.  The Good: The world pulls together to collectively lower emissions and switch towards clean energy.  The Bad: The USA and China both ignore the signs for another ten years before its unavoidable.  The Knobber: A pissed off Captain Planet raises world temperatures by 2000 degrees after the next usage of an aerosol-based mosquito repellent.
• Dating: A guy goes to a bar with some of his friends looking to have a good time and maybe meet some girls.  The Good: He has a few drinks and gets the number of a nice girl that he’ll call after 2 days.  The Bad: He has way too many drinks and throws up in the bathroom before his friends carry him home to sleep off his hangover.  The Knobber: He accidently hits on a transvestite and gets gang-raped in the janitor’s closet by a horde of steroid using, mutant drag queens ala Shawshank Redemption style.

One more …

• Children: You and your significant other are trying to have your first born child.  You’ve got the room painted, the hospital picked out, a birthing plan, and money tucked away for college.  The Good: You successfully conceive a healthy baby.  The Bad: There are complications getting pregnant because the man’s underwear is too hot for his sperms and has to wear an ice pack on his twig and bits in the hopes of producing good swimmers.  The Knobber: You produce a child by unknowingly having a nightmarish liaison with the Prince of Darkness.  The child is horrific, horned, and doomed to be the next Anti-Christ.  Some creepy old guy in the back starts yelling, “He has his father’s eyes.  Satan is his father, not Guy.  Hail Satan!”

And for these reasons, I’m considering sponge bathing myself in my kitchen sink.