A tale of two hot tubs by Drevlow

To celebrate not killing myself for the forty-fourth year in a row, I treat myself to an inflatable hot tub.

It was only like four hundred or something.

An adult kiddie pool.

A month in and already a slow leak, the heater working like half the time.

It smells fishy and the bottom is kind of slimy.

Probably because I don’t shower before I use it.

Because I have open sores.

And I don’t wear swim shorts.

I wear my sweat-wicking spandex boxer-briefs. 

That happy medium between being naked and half-naked.

I sometimes imagine the neighbors calling the cops on me for indecent exposure.

What’s the difference, shorts and spandex undies? I imagine myself telling them.

When I was fourteen my house burned down and with the insurance money my parents got me an actual hot tub to make me feel less guilty that I had accidentally burned down my family’s house.

I wore shorts then.

My father wore nothing.

My father would come in after doing chores at the farm and he would come in through the mudroom and throw off all his manure-smelling clothes, including his tighty-whities.

Then he’d step in the hot tub with me with his shriveled up old man dick pointing at me.

My father is not a hippy, is not an advocate for public nudity.

He’s a farmer and a pragmatist. 

If he has to piss and he’s out at the farm, he’s going to whip it out and piss whether his youngest son is standing there watching him or not.

He’s a farmer with two fake hips and arthritis in his knees.

A man who designed and built his own house with a mud room on the first floor and a bedroom on the second.

Why’s he going to tromp manure all over the house just so he can avoid getting naked in his own house, the house he built with his own two hands, after his youngest son accidentally burned down the last house he built with his own two hands, just to avoid showing himself to his youngest son who got a hot tub after he burned down the family’s house?

Sometimes I think about explaining this to the cops when I imagine the neighbors calling them on me for wearing my sweat-wicking spandex boxer-briefs to go out to the hot tub.

Sometimes I think about how many times I tried to drown myself in that old fire-money insurance hot tub.

How much chlorinated water I swallowed and vomited in the process.

How stupid you have to be to think you can drown yourself in a hot tub.

Sometimes I think about how my father would probably know how to fix this leak in my inflatable hot tub.

The same way he’d know how to fix the heater.

And if he wasn’t him and I wasn’t me, I would probably call him up and he’d tell me how to fix it and then we could bond over our shared arthritis, shot hips, bad knees, and love of hot tubs, and the impracticalities of taking showers or wearing clothes in them.

But I am me and he is he and so here I sit in my slimy, lukewarm half-deflated hot tub drinking my flat Miller Lite and waiting for the cops to come take me away.

Or do whatever they do for lewd behavior these days.

Happy birthday to me.

Drevlow is EIC & poet laureate of all things BULL/bull. You can check out more of his bull shit at thedrevlow-olsonshow.com or on twitter, insta, face, bsky, & threads @thedrevlow.