you make bath-time lots of fun

Now I'm not saying I would ever shop for myself at bath and body works, but my wife happens to have these two products that I use more than she does--the eucalyptus and mint foaming bath and bath salts. I've always been a sucker for a hot bath and a good book. Seriously, I'll spend forty five minutes just soaking and reading. So I took a bath after work the other night for the first time in quite a while. I used the foaming bath and decided to throw in some bath salts for an extra touch. After reading Franny and Zooey for about forty minutes I decided it was time to enter back into real time. In the post bath hours before bed, I couldn't believe how relaxed and stress-free I felt. So so nice.

I have been reading Salinger's Franny and Zooey strictly because I took The Catcher in the Rye with me on the plane to California last weekend and after finishing it I immediately started reading it over again. Once I got back to the house I figured I hadn't had enough of Salinger yet, so I picked up Franny and Zooey. My copy of this book was given to me on my 24th birthday by Bill Brower with the note, "on your way to the Eastern Philosophy chair in hell." I thought that was nice. Not too many people have given me books as gifts. Bill knew me well enough to know that I would love that book--the budding ascetic that I was. After finishing it back then, I immediately sought out and read The Way of the Pilgrim and then found a copy of the Philokalia in some small town Minnesota bookstore along the Mississippi river (this was while I was spending time in a Russian Orthodox monastery).

I suppose my move out to North Carolina was in many ways an attempt at asceticism--an attempt that seems to have mostly failed. Or has it?