When Things Get Too Photoreal

Your life is terrible. Your work is meaningless, unfulfilling, and meagerly compensated. You’ve never been much to look at, but even so you’re noticeably in decline. Of course, there are more important things in life — kindness, decency, for example. But you’ve always been deficient in those departments too, so.

Your home is a dump. No surface is free from clutter. Clothes are heaped on every piece of furniture, examples from every stage of the laundry cycle. Piles of the lowest quality consumer goods loom in every corner, monuments to your failures both of impulse control and housekeeping.

Your friends are creeps. Through all your many setbacks, not one of them has ever offered a word of sympathy or encouragement. It’s just put-downs and backstabbing and shit-talking with them. The “good” ones leave it at that. The others rope you into dramatic scenes of their own — interpersonal, financial, occasionally criminal.

Your family members are schmucks, bumbling through life with the haplessness you’ve always modeled for them. Cretins, all; they disgust you. The single trait that slightly redeems them? They don’t care much for you either.

How did it come to this? Didn’t you have aspirations once? Didn’t you dream of amounting to something? Was your life always going to be this way? Just a long, slow slide into a deeper and deeper morass of disappointment? Couldn’t you have gotten a toehold somewhere along the way? Couldn’t you have done better with just a little bit of determination, or talent, or dumb luck?

The stink of failure hangs on you, and also the stink of Big Mac sweat.

It’s time to take a shower.

In the shower, you are transported.

Behind the bright, beautiful beach scene pictured on your Beach Front Photoreal PEVA shower curtain, all your well-earned despondency dissolves. Now you’re in the surf at a sunny, tropical resort! The waves break over your body like a repeating baptism! You’re new! You’re happy! You’re better! The frustrations of your everyday life can’t vex you here on this idyllic shore! You’re beyond their reach!

You’re living your best life! You’re luxuriating in the sun! Your smile is radiant! Your body mass index is ideal! Your piña colada is ready, and it’s served in a real coconut! You laugh at all the silly fools back home, trudging through their sad, grey lives, on the other side of the Beach Front Photoreal PEVA shower curtain! Those saps!

Your spirits are lifted. Your soul is restored. Your hands are pruny as hell.

The shower’s starting to run cold. How long have you been in here? You shut off the water, grab a towel, and push your beautiful, vibrant Beach Front Photoreal PEVA shower curtain aside to step back into the dull squalor of your miserable real life.

But it’s not so bad now. You’re just back from the beach. It’ll get you through another day.

It’ll have to.