Augusten Burroughs Scares Me.

One of the authors I've been catching up on the past two months has been Augusten Burroughs, he of "Running with Scissors" and "Dry" fame. Have finished those two books, I'm now in the midst of reading "Magical Thinking," a collection of short stories, comprised of vignettes from his life.

What I have read sometimes scares the hell out of me. It's not his early life or his sexual proclivities. And I'm not talking about the pedophilia from "Scissors" or the rehab scenes from "Dry"-- what really scared me was something he wrote in "Thinking." Something that takes place in the East Village as well.

After killing a mouse in his bathrub, he writes what a plumber told him: "Vermin sometimes climb up into the plumbing and get trapped in the shower head." Going along this path, he then says, "[w]hich meant that I may have been showering, may still be showering, may someday be showering with piping-hot water filtered through the carcass of a dead rat, without even knowing it."

This disturbs me more than anything Brett Easton Ellis could write, a la the scene in "American Psycho" with the rat.

And I am definitely taking a closer look at my showerhead tomorrow.