Hotel Soap

Ever notice that hotel soap always burns the shit out of your
eyes? I fear washing my face when traveling just because I know it’s going to
feel like a million needles poking my retinas. 

When I wash my face or shower at home, it doesn’t burn my eyes.
Hypothetically it could be a difference in approach to scrubbing my ugly mug.
Maybe I’m subconsciously deliberately rubbing soap directly into my eyes. But I
don’t think so. Which means that it must be a quality-of-the-soap thing. 
  
Begs the question: Just how poor of quality is hotel soap? At
home, I’m not exactly using Fight Club-quality soap rendered from the fat of
liposuction patients. I tend to use Suave or some other generic equivalent that
costs about $3 for a 6-month supply. I know, I know, “Take it easy on the soap
expenditures, Rockefeller.” My eyes never get the awful stingy feeling from
Suave.

Maybe even worse than the pain, it turns your eyes the darkest
possible shade of optical red. Even if you were well behaved the night before it
makes you look like you’ve just completed the sort of bender usually reserved
for your best friend’s wedding or grandpa’s funeral. If your eyes are going to
look like that, you may as well get blasted. Everyone you see the next day assumes
you did, anyway.
 
Of course, there is a treatment for devil-red eyes. Gallons of
Visine. I just pour the stuff in hoping it washes away the
contagious-stage-of-pink-eye look. Maybe that’s what is really going on. Maybe
Visine and the very powerful Hotel/Motel Super PAC are in cahoots. Afterall,
every hotel sells the smallest bottle imaginable of Visine for like $5. Which is
highway robbery.

I guess this is why women tend to travel with all of their own
toiletries. That’s probably the answer. But, doubt I’ll deploy that simple
solution. Instead, I’ll spend the rest of my life swearing like a sailor every
time I wash my face at a hotel. Afterall, I’m a man. And that’s the sort of
stubborn stupidity that defines our very existence.