Yahoo News The tap you drink from in your house says a lot about you
Recently I drank from the forbidden tap and it did not harm me. I was as surprised as anyone. And yet, lying awake at night, I know that what I did was deeply unnatural and the experience has surely changed me in ways it will take years to fully comprehend.
The tap you drink from says a lot about you. There’s a hierarchy to the taps in your house, and even if you don’t observe it consciously you probably abide by it in some way. You may argue that the water all comes from the same source, but its taste is inarguably defined by the vibe of its tap. As we are hardcoded to interpret the taste of water as a sign of the integrity of our environment, that’s everything – would you rather choose a pristine alpine spring over a grey creek with a skeleton at its banks?
And if you really believed it was all the same you’d be boiling your pasta with water from the bathroom tap. Imagine. God exploded Sodom and Gomorrah for less.
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The kitchen
A confession: growing up I would usually get my water from the bathroom tap. The kitchen pipes were old and grimy. The mid-century water pressure made them shake like a giant murderer rattling his cage in hell. It tasted like how I imagine the Titanic now does, and it gave the same satisfaction of licking moisture from a dungeon’s walls for survival.
This isn’t the way it should be. Once we’d renovated our ancient pipes the kitchen tap became my primary water source, as nature intended. The kitchen should be your primary drinking source too, full stop.
Kitchen tap water tastes like it’s meant to be drunk. It feels better in the body. Not only is it the most hydrating and physically nourishing tap, being located where food is made and stored, it’s also near the cups, so unless you like carrying a mug around on your belt like some character from The Canterbury Tales, you know this is your first port of call.
Bathroom tap
The bathroom tap has an important place in the house. It’s for cleansing. It’s for healing, routine, ritual. Thus, it’s mostly drunk from under certain conditions, and never recreationally. It can be taken in the middle of the night or ported to the bedside table (suggesting soporific properties). It can be collected in the mouth while showering because you’re too hungover to bend down to a tap or walk to the kitchen.
If this is your primary drinking tap then you’d better have a good excuse, like when you eat nothing but orange vitamin C tablets because you don’t have any real snacks in the house.
Garden tap
This is a specialist tap and should only be drunk from by your dad or for if you’re trying to wash out the taste of a bug that flew into your mouth when you were running around carelessly. This is a tap for dogs and plants. The water it produces is wild and should not be taken lightly.
The laundry is a place of chemicals and chemical reactions. You’d have an easier time getting a nice drink of water in an evil alchemist’s lab
Certainly there’s something compelling about that? It’s at odds with the civilisation we believe ourselves safe in. To drink from it is to glimpse a distant, primordial era, when we all drank blood and didn’t have to remember so many passwords. It’s a reminder of who we once were, who we may one day be again. Plus it sometimes has slugs in it, so watch out!
Laundry tap
But there is a darker road – that of the laundry tap drinker, a road I now find myself travelling down for better or worse. Previously I thought this would be a tap you would only drink from in a survival situation, or if you were one of those special forces guys whose perception of reality has been altered by intensely late nights. Now I know who it’s for: thirsty fools, disoriented by the tumult of the secondhand dryer, distracted enough to do something irreversible.
This is the tap nobody should drink from. The laundry is a place of chemicals and chemical reactions – poisonous slimes, mystery powders, clouds of choking lint you can’t seem to do anything with. (Does the government come and take them away?) The tap reflects these treacherous properties. You’d have an easier time getting a nice drink of water in an evil alchemist’s lab, and probably less chance of accidentally snorting a line of detergent while you were doing it.
Any sink where there’s two separate hot/cold taps instead of a single tap
God will forgive us a lot but surely there are some things he has circled too many times in his big red book.
Jack Vening is a writer living in Melbourne.
