I am the only one who thinks I'm going crazy

Today was a showerday which was a good thing because my hair was sticking up in ways that would have made my seventh-grade self green with envy. In addition, even though I use the Official Deodorant of the NBA (TM), I feared I would begin to smell. How do they even know the formula works the same on a near seven foot black man as it does on an overweight white kid? I probably sweat less than him in any case.

Either way, that's not what this post is about. It is about shampoo; specifically, it is about Head and Shoulders Anti-Dandruff shampoo. Last time I showered, I ran out of the shampoo I like to use, which smells like citrus, which is good because people love when people peel oranges and clementines in their general periphery. I was forced, then, to use my back up bottle of shampoo. I wet my hair, which is, in full disclosure, a fairly new showering habit. I squirted some of that sweet stuff into my hand and it felt fucking bizarre. I've never touched that slime that snails leave behind when they snail around, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say the textures are one and the same.

Alarmed, I checked the expiration date. This needlessly sent me into an existential crisis. My shampoo expired in November of 2007. This meant, among other things (like why it felt so weird), that I bought it -- well, my mother bought it -- before I left to come here. Dubious hygienic practices aside, it dawned on me that these 40 fluid ounces have watched maniacally from the top shelf on my closet everything I have done since August 23rd, 2007. It has borne witness to every blowjob and every breakdown, every friendship and every failed friendship, every time I've made a bad decision and every time I've made love. There's more alliteration and parallel structure where that came from, but you get the point.

It's my backup bottle of shampoo. It knows it will never be the most loved, but it knows it's the one I'll come crawling back to when my sweet citrus has died at last. So it waits. And it remembers.

My hair was wet and so I bit the bullet. Washing the shampoo out of my hair gave way to one of the more disgusting textures I've ever felt, but war makes people do terrible things.