Shower Curtains and Other Travels
Yesterday, I wrote about the dreams of alternative nineties kids and the current fall of the American Empire. Today, I have an equally vital and serious message for the youth of America, a new lesson I’ve learned in 2025. Let me save you precious time. Don’t wait til your fifties to free yourself.
You are not the problem. Hotel shower curtains are the problem.
Like me, you may have devoted some time to shower curtains in a motel/hotel. I have tried to keep the floor dry, and I have never once succeeded. Not among the Red Roof Inns and local motor courts of my childhood. Not in early motherhood and the Comfort Inns offering a reliable swimming pool at the lowest price point. Not in the business travel and conference Hiltons and Marriotts of my career peak.
It doesn’t matter if my room features a regular plastic curtain that’s just inches too short or missing too many hooks. It doesn’t matter if I’ve got a fancy glass door and tile situation. The doors are not quite plumb and leave a gap, or the space age shower head points one of its nozzles towards sky or sink. A hotel stay always guarantees some time spent wiping up the floor with a sopping bath mat.
The worst is the limp, two-layer nylon curtain with snaps. I’ve spent every hotel journey, thinking that I’m just one stop away from figuring it out. I hold onto this last vision of post-war American exceptionalism. In my heart, I’m a 1950s bobby soxer who believes that inventions were made to work. If a mass-produced design doesn’t work, it’s only because I haven’t figured it out.
The white nylon shower curtain has tried me. It’s always wet, never dry. Am I supposed to separate the clinging layers and put one inside the tub and one out? Maybe. That ends with the inner layer getting sucked toward my staticky body in a shower vortex. I don’t want to touch a wet shower curtain that just hours ago wrapped itself around a stranger’s naked body. Plus it still leaks. Or maybe both layers go on the inside? That gives the curtain enough weight to cling to the tub wall rather than to one’s legs, and the entire curtain ends up water-logged. The floor still gets wet. How about both layers on the outside with an attempt to attach the magnets on the bottom seam to the plastic composite tub? Flood city.
Like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, I had an epiphany this week in a Doubletree in Manchester, New Hampshire. A nylon shower curtain and the truth looked me in the face. Only instead of God asking why I was persecuting him, I found myself asking the shower curtain some hard questions. I finally understood that the problem is not with me; it’s with the shower curtain. If I’ve spent decades trying to make something work, maybe I’m not what’s wrong. Maybe the thing itself is flawed. The two-layer nylon with snaps was never meant to work. It was meant to be durable and replaceable. It was never meant to keep the floor dry. It was meant to tick the box on a form that said, “Does this hotel room have a shower curtain?” The question was never, does the shower curtain work?
This revelation will not lead to fewer minutes of this life spent on drying motel room bathroom floors. It does give me peace to free up all the mindspace I had devoted to the topic of hotel shower curtains. I can use that brain room for faces and names and local Cincinnati radio station jingles of the 1980s.
Learn from me, young people. Free yourself now. The hotel bathroom floor will never be dry.
