Today I went out to buy shampoo, among other things. Usually a bottle of shampoo lasts me a good long while - a couple of months at least, though I've never bothered to carefully measure the duration. In any case, since I appear to be the only person in my house who actually bothers to purchase toiletries other than toilet paper my stuff gets used up fairly quickly. So today I went out to buy shampoo. Among other things.

And one of the things that struck me, as it always does, is that there are not only about thirty brands of shampoo but roughly thirty types of shampoos for each brand. This is a problem for tons of stuff, especially orange juice, which has five or more spectra along which any individual bottle varies, including orangeness, pulp, age, organicness, and size. And of course there are the various brands and so forth. So supermarkets are increasingly having to create these elaborate labyrinthine mazes of orange juice stands which have, naturally at the center and therefore hardest to get to, the orange juice you are looking for, guarded by an angry minotaur. This is called "customer service". Anyway, shampoo.

So there are about nine hundred different choices in shampoo. The good news is that women have roughly two hundred times this many choices, since shampoo can also be a cosmetic thing and therefore multiplies like some sort of rabbit/mosquito hybrid that looks cute but in fact causes West Nile Disease. I appreciate my health and not being paralyzed both from an infectious agent and hideous death-clown visages, and therefore do not care much for women who wear heavy makeup. Honestly, you don't need that much. It seems to me that the ideal application of makeup is that you look fine but it's not at all apparent you're wearing makeup. Do not use a ladle to apply it. Anyway, shampoo.

Today, by employing my rigorous method of shampoo selection known as "grabbing the closest one before fleeing for the safety of the bakery", I got "Suave For Men, Thickening 2 in 1 Shampoo/Conditioner for thick full hair". In fact I have relatively thick fine hair in direct violation of the suggested type of hair to have, so I suppose it is possible that I will end up with scalp cancer or scalpititis or clean hair. But really I don't need shampoo for thick hair or thin hair or dandruff control or thickening or hickening or mullet-styling or long-lasting shine or extra body or luster or lice or Nazis or tiny robots that walk around inside of you before becoming part of your hair and then take control of your brain and force you to do unspeakable things such as vote Republican ha ha ha zing.

My ideal shampoo would therefore be "Cheapbrand For Humans, Non-Thickening Or Thinning 1 in 1 Shampoo for dirty hair." So far as I know my store does not stock this kind of shampoo, but I guess it might. After all, I didn't risk the minotaur.