Word: pooling
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This spring, as workers dug a swimming pool in my backyard, I imagined myself adrift on an inflatable chaise or just gazing out at the Barbicide-blue water, my days passing in a flip-flopped, tank-topped bliss...
...months later, I sometimes feel like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard floating facedown in the pool with a bullet in his back. "The poor dope," he says, narrating from the afterlife. "He always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool...
Except that I didn't really want a pool. I never thought I was the kind of person who should own one (Hugh Hefner, everyone on Cribs), didn't want to dress like the kind of person who owned one (Hef again, or Dustin Hoffman in Meet the Fockers) and never even cared all that much for getting wet (I hadn't owned a bathing suit in 10 years; I now have three...
...think I am, owning a pool? Or worse: Who do the neighbors think I think I am? Thanks to the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies, swimmin' pools will always be synonymous with movie stars--a sign of self-indulgence, of idle-rich ennui. When Liv Ullmann said, "Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool," she wasn't paying the town a compliment...
Rock stars, too, like their swimming pools: Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones was found dead in one, Keith Moon of the Who claimed to have driven a Lincoln into one, and Joe Perry of Aerosmith--among many others--has one shaped like a guitar. Bono has lampooned the average activist rocker as a guy "with a swimming pool shaped like his own head." Paul McCartney said he and John Lennon used to sit down to compose saying "Let's write us a swimming pool...