The Bathtub is Falling

The bathtub is falling, the bathtub is falling!

We live in an old house, the cracks around the tub and wall have noticeably widened since the last two earthquakes. There's been a permeable odor of mold that I can't seem to locate or eradicate. I scrub the tub and shower curtain, spray the cracked grouting with a bleach solution and think perhaps it's the walls or the sub-flooring that is rotting.

I had an odd thought while showering. Perhaps it was a dream fragment. What if the heavy enamel iron tub just fell through the floor to the basement below while I was bathing? I couldn't walk out the basement as the crawlspace is too low, and the little trap door below the front porch is locked from the outside.

I'd be barefoot, naked and wet in a crawlspace where I normally wouldn't want to be fully clothed. Spiders, cobwebs, small rodent carcasses. Maybe even a cat or an opossom...like under Brooke's house...

Even if I could get to the outside of the house, then what? I'd be wet, buckass-naked (not a pretty sight at my age) nearly 55, gimpy-kneed and dirty, standing outside on my front porch, locked out of my house. Then what? Wait for the mailman to come? And run away screaming? Though my hair falls iin a thick mane to below my waist, I was never exactly Bottacelli's Venus on the half shell. And at the rate my hair grows, it'll be another half-century before it falls to my knees.

Or I could just stand in the fallen subterranean tub and scream or wait. But then who would hear me or who would hoist me up? I couldn't crawl out. I'd have to wait until this evening when Neil gets home. Throw me a rope. Naked, vulnerable, unkempt—sort of like the process of writing. And why was I thinking of all this with myself in the third person? She. Sidhe, as in otherworld barrow—what is beneath the surface.

Back to an audience of one hand clapping, from what I can tell, not even the mice are reading my blogs. So who is my audience? From what I can tell, according to the Technorati and Google spiders and webcrawlers, I'm the only one reading my own work. I got irritated when Technorati kept listing my blogs as unclaimed. Hey, it's mine—even if no one but the spiders are reading it.

Doesn't that defeat the purpose? Do I invite people to read my blogs? Or do I remain hidden in the crowd behind the hordes of some 3 million bloggers out there? No, make that nearly 4 million. The Technorati count was 3 million mid- August. Who is reading all this stuff anyway? Technorati spiders seem to only pick up the pages with typos and even after I revise and correct them, the offending pages stay up for all the world to see my imperfect art.

No one leaves any comments on my pages. I actually put a site visitor counter on my blog, but, as I suspected, I was the only one who was triggering the counter with all that obsessive editing. I took the counter off, disenheartened. After all, it's better not to know who isn't reading this. And so I end this one on a double negative. But at least it's progress.