Every time someone else in my building uses any water it changes the temperature of my shower. I'm sitting on a plastic chair, head down with the water spraying my shoulders and back, some hits my scalp and drips down my face.

  It's a Kodachrome symphony of touch on my skin and for a moment I don't feel warm water. I recognize that the water is both hot and cold at the same time, for the first time I can feel the temperature of each drop, maybe each molecule. It's really more puzzling than relaxing and I wonder for a bit if I will ever be able to enjoy the simple sensation of warm water again. I'm receiving billions (?) of discrete bits of temperature information one tiny bit at a time, each bit having a single value that is a distillation of a larger data set. It's like a million individual shockingly hot bits of information all take an oblique half step to the left and a million more bits of shockingly cold information step in between the heated bits over and over in an endlessly variable dance, every bit delivering one particle of information that can ultimately be traced back to the sun. I recognize the compound effect as "warm" but the fact that I experience warm as tiny bits of hot and cold that combine but don't seem to share or exchange or "average out" their individual caloric valence is pretty distracting. For a while the hot bits overpower the cold bits. More and more heat information hits my skin. On some level I distractedly wonder if I'm getting scalded. There are just enough cold bits mixed in to keep me from being overly concerned. The whole time I'm staggered a little by the fact that a f*cking shower could be so interesting. There's a sudden resurgence of cold bits, then things balance, the information seamlessly blends and I interpret the sensation on my skin as warm again and I'm relieved. It was a toilet flushing somewhere on the second floor. The moment is gone, it's just a shower again.

  I think about binary code. I'm as computer illiterate as anyone else born in '67 but I grasp the whole 0/1, on/off, if/then presence/absence as a communication concept at a basic level. I wonder how many terabytes of data I just processed.

  Naturally, this led to the epiphany that water is a fabulous conductor of information, maybe more so than my own brain.

  This in turn led to briefly musing on the possibility that a single water molecule may well be the most intelligent or information-dense matter based entity that exists. The idea of a hive mind made of water finally cracks through my astonishment. I feel myself recoiling from the implications of a single drop of water being able to hold and transmit an almost infinite amount of raw data from the heart of a star and shut off the shower.

There's a vague sense that the universe is composed of action (vibrational frequency expressed as heat) and awareness (whatever quantifies such a thing). Everything we perceive being a combination of sidestepping bits of each in varying proportion. The towel smells weird. I wonder how it would smell underwater and dry off thoughtfully.