If there's a downside to the increasing attention men have devoted to towards grooming and overall self-care in the last few years, it's probably a slightly too-fastidious attitude, almost a fussiness, that goes along with daily ritual. We're firmly out of the Vitalis and Royall Bayrhum era, and it's perfectly okay to moisturize, to use product in your hair, maybe even to use beard oil. But there's a subtle danger in starting your day, first thing, with the meticulous precision of straight razor and floss even before your forebrain is online. What's your poor id to do? While your ego and superego are engaging in precision depilation, it's surely up to no good.
Which is why you must eat a cold orange in the shower with your bare hands. Every day. And I swear, no hyperbole, it's the most completely healthy mind-body-soul activity a person can indulge.
First consider the orange. No reasonable person can come up with a reason not to eat an orange. Merely consumed at the table, oranges are like eating little handfuls of sunshine. It seems impossible that something so astoundingly, nakedly delicious could be good for you, but the sheer density of vitamins and dietary fiber and minerals they contain is frankly embarrassing when you realize you've let whole days of your life have gone by without one.
Now that you've considered it, get some. Five bucks gets you four pounds, a dozen, good for a week of shower oranges at least. Put them in the fridge, because you want them at about forty degrees. That's it for prep. Could it be any simpler?
In the morning— because this is really best done first thing, before your cerebral cortex is fully engaged— grab an orange from the fridge. Get your shower going good and hot. Then step in, ideally with the water hitting you in the chest. Hold the orange up out of the spray. Peel it with your fingers.
Now, this is important. Don't worry about how you peel it. Just get that peel off using your fingers. We're getting back to the id now. Peel off big chunks and let the peel fall. It's all part of the process. Use your teeth if you have to.
Here's where it goes all the way to the base of your spine. If you think oranges smell good in the mundane world, the sheer olfactory transport of a shower orange may be enough to momentarily paralyze you. That's because the humidity in the your shower transmits the complex limonenes and butanoates and esters and other complex aromatics in your orange are transmitted more effectively to the nerves in your nose. But that's mere science; that's for later.
All your morning brain knows is that it's been taken over by the smell of oranges. And smell is a giant part of taste.
So give in to the obvious. Bury your face in that orange. Be feral, be visceral, let that id loose. Let the cold juice run down your chin and into your chest. Let the juice and pulp and pips get everywhere. Use your teeth to scrape the sections out of the hollow as you press the peel into your face.
It will be delicious, almost overwhelmingly so, and an alarming number of synapses will fire in your brain. Indeed, some of the oldest, most powerful parts of your brain will be fireworks. Smell and taste are the senses that arrive first in life and persist longest in memory, as well as every morning of every day. Which is the point, exactly, of eating a cold orange in the hot shower, before anything else can happen, before you can even be called awake. Later there will be shaving, scrubbing, for soap and astringent and pomade and antiperspirant and trimming nails and eyebrows. But now there is the primitive comfort, the best indulgence of human need, the full sensual spectrum of tart on the tongue and juice on cheeks and chin, the bloom of scent in the steam, and all being carried over you by water.
It's the most primal part of your day, the best opportunity for letting the ancient preverbal part of you out to run around, before it's time to knot it up behind a tie and send it out in public again. You will, inevitably and willingly, force your evolution to social animal. But all that day you'll retain a taste of that morning, the juice running in rivulets down the chest, the essence of orange rising in the mist.
When your orange is gone, jump under the spray and savor the last fading sensations. The taste and smells will fade, although the peel by your feet will be nice and fragrant for a while. But that sensation of having indulged in some basic animal sensuality, and therefore of having gotten away with something, will stay with you.
Plus it's a great source of Vitamin C, you savage you.
