Series of mildly related thoughts.

While plodding away at work this morning I succumbed to a fit of procrastination and took the opportunity to examine my water bottle from all sides. I always give my water bottle labels a thorough peeling, so it's not often that I get to gaze on the exciting line-drawings of mountains and streams name-plates. I was thus occupied when I realized something disturbing: water is a total show-off.

To preface, I love tap water. People are always gabbing on and on about how the water in Davis is distasteful (too liberal?) and whenever I’m not too busy guzzling water straight from the hose I take the time to disagree with this. It tastes perfectly acceptable to me.

My boyfriend and I are in the formative stages of a plan that requires drinking several dozen bottles full of sparkling lemonade, with the intent of filling them with marvelous tap water and stockpiling them in the fridge, thereby enabling us to constantly be lumbering about swigging from a chilled bottle held by the neck. [To be clear, that last sentence is both the longest in my blog thus far and a blatant digression.] Obviously, I am no anti-water freak with an ugly rock lawn.

And yet, the unbridled liquid ego of bottled water rankles me. There is no need for a Nutrition Facts panel when the answer for every value is 0 percent (based on a 2000-calorie daily diet). If you need to include it, you might as well mention things like 0 % water snake particulate matter, or 0 % crawdads disease, both of which concern me more than the fact that water lacks carbs. So you have no sodium, no calories and no sugar. Stop showing off. You also have no color. And I think that Sierra Mist, semi-transparent N-64 game systems and albinos can attest that having no color is bad news.

So, while reflecting on water I was reminded of the Willa Cather documentary that I watched last night (because I’m that kind of crazy party kid). In addition to revealing Willa Cather’s suspect sex life and history of the risky hair decisions, the documentary featured several melodramatic voice-over excerpts from her novels against a visual of casually wind-swept prairie.

This is exactly the sort of thing that I like about documentaries, the low-budget reenactment feeling. I’m quite fond of long dramatic shots featuring someone’s hand writing with a feather quill while a lilting voice reads the Gettysburg address or the personal correspondence of some hella religious corn farmer. I’m also keen on panning shots of cannons and flags with the noise of bullets whizzing and swords clanging. I even like a repetitive circling of a gallows accompanied by a noisy courtroom soundtrack, complete with audience shuffling and pounding gavel.

Anyway, in this Willa Cather documentary featured one such reenactment. A man and his packhorse were picture from the knee-down roaming listlessly in the desert in search of water. The narrator was reading from the novel Death Comes for the Archbishop and explained that the priest was following his pack animal, hoping that the mule might sense water. There's some nonsense about a cactus casting the shadow of a cross, and maybe some metaphor about needing God almost (but not quite) as much as you need water. Eventually the super-star mule leads the priest to water.

It occurs to me that a water company might do much better to detail this story on the side of the bottle instead of including a Nutrition Facts panel.

PS, I'm reading The Way of All Flesh by S. Butler, which is very slow going, but offers important insights about the valuing your offspring. Por exemplo:

“His money was never naughty; his money never made noise or litter, and it did not spill things on the tablecloth at mealtimes or leave the door open when it went out. His dividends did not quarrel amongst themselves, nor was he under any uneasiness lest his mortgages become extravagant upon reaching manhood and run him up debts which sooner or later he would have to pay.”