TKOG Who bathes in totally inappropriate substances (a TMI Thursday — may TMI Thursdays rest in peace)

NTKOG #168: The kind of lushed-up beauty queen who — not content with pedestrian water — bathes herself in the brew of the gods. Or Newcastle. Whichever’s cheaper.

I am: definitely on the dirty hippie side. I can take nary a step without granola crunching under my be-sandaled feet.

I am not,: however, especially convinced that any beauty products work better than plain ol’ evil chemicals.

The Verdict: The last morning of the aquapocalypse, staring with grim disbelief at my lank, frizzy locks. Some combination of tentative showering (what with the whole e. coli scare) and unseasonable humidity had transformed my usually lovely hair into a prop from a Poison video, and it was time to demand change.

Since I was already on a personal quest to replace all of my (potentially tainted) water with booze, cracked open a bottle of Newcastle before my morning shower. The hiss of carbonation reminded me of a tip I’d read in TeenBeat back in the late ’90s: Catherine Zeta-Jones (then an unknown Welsh hottie) maintained her glossy dark mane by rinsing it with a weekly six-pack of brew.

Sounds reasonable to me. Popped in the shower, went through my normal routine, then slowly decanted about ten ounces of beer onto my hair, pausing only to massage it into the roots.

Let me clarify the thought process I’m about to reveal by fully admitting that my mind was in a highly non-functional state. Seven in the morning on a Tuesday, sipping a beer in my bathroom and thinking about TeenBeat magazine — my brain-dead alibi is airtight, right?

So as I massaged the foaming brew into my follicles, two overwhelming observations. First:  holy sweet frig, that mess burned. Booze flooded my eyes and shot up my nostrils in immense quantity. And y’all moralizers can call alcohol a drug all you want, but, dude, clearly not a real one as it is not. made. for. snorting.

Second: glancing at the puddle of beer pooling around my ankles, was shocked at how much it looked as though I’d urinated not just prodigiously but with great fluency and creative zeal. For some reason, my morning brain-paralysis found this situation impossible to parse. Worse, I felt cheated. We’re on the express train to TMI Towne here when I admit that there are few things on this earth I love as much as that first morning pee. Your kidneys have just buckled down for an uninterrupted eight-hour filtration jam, bladder full and tender like a pimple on the verge of popping and — bam, lurid hue, full of discarded nutrients. Pee so thriving with life that if you did it outside on the grass, a tree would immediately sprout up in a friggin’ Narnia-style tableau. Truly, it’s one of the few universal joys, yet there I stood, ale pickling my eyeballs, staring at what looked like an award-winning morning pee, yet feeling no release or sense of accomplishment.

So. That’s how my Tuesday started. Twenty minute self-monologue about peeing, following by imagining hot late-’90s Catherine Zeta-Jones standing in a puddle of her own ersatz urine, before finally rolling into work twenty minutes late, reeking like a hobo, with hair so dry and frizzy I had to wear it in a dang ponytail. Yes I win at everything forever.

The Verdict: In a heroic effort to fully de-tangent, my honest review of beer-rinsing your hair: sounds great in theory, but only made my hair worse than before by making me smell like happy hour while doing nothing to tame my frizz. Not a hint o’ gloss in sight. Though, to be fair, attempting to get up a good gloss in very curly hair is by and large a fool’s errand, so if any blown-straight brunettes want to attempt this, they might have a happier resolution than I. Or at least make fewer allusions to allegorical Christian literature as a means of expressing their searingly intense thoughts about morning pee.

Tagged as: beer rinse, catherine zeta-jones, disclaimer: obviously i'm not advocating snortables here. just noting that hops and barley are not among their ranks., hair, if you deny that a prodigious morning pee makes you feel like A CHAMPION then let us not pursue this friendship any further, it's okay if you guys don't love me anymore because i talked about pee so much, pee, poor cs lewis getting dragged into all of this, rejoice at the lack of pictures, this kind of makes it sound like i pee in my shower which i actually don't because i take so many baths but is a totally awesome hygienic and water-saving practice that i fully endorse, TMI Thursday, wow i guess i really wrote a post about that