This is a completely mundane and thoroughly pointless tale of brotherhood and understanding.
I’ve been shaving for about seventeen years now (almost finished), and I’m still not particularly good at it. It always ends in at least a minor injury, to the point where I’ve grown to resent it. Resent not only the act itself and the Gilette corporation’s insistence that we keep doing it, but the ancient Sumerians for coming up with the idea in the first place.
So I’d been growing my beard out for the past three months or so, and all was right with the world. But after a long and oddly itchy day at work, I decided I’d had enough and it was time for it to go. I got home late; made peace with my inner, hairier self; went at it with a beard-trimmer for a little bit, and then shaved off my mustache.
I swear to God it was the most painful thing that’s happened to me since I was circumcised. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got the right perspective on this – I’ve seen the movies where guys shave with Bowie knives and of course I’ve read the story about the guy trapped in the mountains who cut his own arm off, so I do realize that it could’ve been worse. But dammit, it hurt. What I’d failed to take into account is that I’d been using my last remaining razor blade for the past three months, giving my neck a once-over about once a week. It had served me well, so no grudges against the blade itself; I was just asking too much of it.
After cleaning up the Shining-like display of blood and gore and hair that now covered the bathroom sink, I was left with no fresh blades and me with no mustache, looking a little like a 50’s monster-movie werewolf in mid-transition. I live deep in the suburbs, where every razor-blade retailer closes by 11 PM, so I was stuck with what was on hand. I reckoned I could probably get a little bit more use out of the remaining blade, so I had to make a choice: salty sea-captain, or wanna-be hipster.
I chose hipster. I carefully and much less painfully shaved off the sides and resigned myself to spending the next day at work hearing cracks about Shaggy and beatniks.
See, I’d always had a philosophical problem with goatees. At best, I thought, it’s missing the point. The goal of any man should be to do as little grooming as possible to a) get laid, and/or 2) not get fired. At worst, it’s an aspect of the worst sin of all: male vanity. So you’re left with exactly two options: if you don’t feel like shaving, you grow a beard. When it gets annoying, you shave it all off. Repeat, over and over, every day of your life, until the day after the day you die. Any more thought or effort put into it than that, and you’ve forsaken your Y chromosome.
But the next day at work, something strange happened. I was all self-conscious, but nobody cared or noticed. A couple people actually said, “You shaved! Looks good!” (They were only being polite, but that’s not the point.) I wasn’t all uncomfortable or itchy or getting hair up my nose or ending the day with that inexplicable, weird nicotine/caffeine/I don’t want to know what else taste on my mustache that’s just too gross to even think about. It was like it wasn’t even there at all! Until I needed to think hard about something, at which point I could rub my chin and look deep in thought, taking on the air of a cultured and distinguished prematurely-graying man of the world. What’s more, I discovered absolutely no change in the number of sex partners I was able to secure in my clean-shaven, bearded, or goateed states.
Could I have been wrong all these years? Could the hipsters and guys in boy bands and sullen guys at comic book shops and X-Treme sports guys have been wiser than me all along? Could it actually be the best of both worlds, not having to deal with The Itch and still not having to shave the difficult parts? Is it too late for me, a 32-year-old office worker who can’t play a musical instrument or ride a skateboard, to take part in this brave new world?
I guess I’ll find out, because I didn’t go out to get razor blades this weekend. Was it laziness, or FREEDOM? All right, it was laziness. But the laziness of FREEDOM!
And I’m still morally opposed to the soul patch.