Rant #2,960: Hair

Gotta get up.
 
Gotta get out of bed.
 
It’s Thursday, August 25, and it is time to rise and shine.
 
Me, I didn’t sleep too well last night.
 
My sleep was intermittent at best, sleeping three hours here, a half hour there, an hour here, 45 minutes there.
 
Not too good.
 
And Thursdays are not my favorite day of the week to begin with, because today is one of the days I shave my face.
 
I truly wish the hair on my head would grow as quickly as the hair on my face, but that is not the reality of the way things are.
 
When I had that thing on my head—that pre-cancerous lesion that I had removed and had all kinds of problems with it until it finally healed late last week—the thing that made it so much worse is that I had no hair on my head to cover it or protect it, so it was out in the open all the time.
 
That might sound like a good thing, but it wasn’t, because several times, in the deep of sleep, I rubbed it or scratched it or at least touched it, and it didn’t help in its healing.
 
If I would have had some hair there to protect it—
 
But that was not meant to be.
 
And as far as my face, I can probably grow a full beard in about a week, but I choose not to.
 
I don’t think I look too good in a beard, and the getting there is the hardest part, as it itches like crazy as it gets bushier.
 
A few of my nephews have beards—or at least some really good stubble—and I have one nephew who is reaching rabbi stages with his beard, topped off with a bald head that he keeps hairless with daily upkeep.
 
I have asked him, and he says that he doesn’t get hot with the long beard, even in the summer we are having now, but it’s just not for me.
 
I know it is stylish now to have long beards with no hair on your head, but again, the hairless head part has been taken out of my hands by forces beyond me, so this isn’t going to happen.
 
Some guys look good with beards.
 
Ringo Starr looks better with a beard than without one, and at this stage of the game, he looks way better than his clean-shaven former band mate Paul McCartney does.
 
Who would of thought that would happen 60 years ago?
 
And there are lots of other guys who look great in beards, but I am not one of them.
 
I look at pictures of myself from different periods of my life, and I wonder where all my head hair went.
 
I had plenty, but it is all gone, never to return.
 
I am too old to take those hair restoration products like Rogaine, so I just have to live with my baldness.
 
I wish they had reverse-Rogaine for my face,, because shaving is not one of my favorite life pursuits, to be honest with you.
 
I do hate to shave, always have, always will.
 
I don’t know how you ladies do it, with your armpits and your legs and your …
 
But you do it, but do you really like doing it, or is it just a necessary chore, part of being a woman?
 
I can’t answer that question for you, but I guess it is probably all of the above.
 
It is funny, though.
 
When you are a young boy, you look at your father shaving and think, “One day I am going to do that myself,” and when you reach that point of your life, you have finally become a man.
 
You anticipate it, you want it to happen so bad, and then, when it happens—for me, in my junior year in high school—you hate the moment, looking forward to thousands of shaves that you are going to have to execute in your life.
 
I have hated it from the get go, and I hated it even more when I shaved three times a week when I had a regular job.
 
The only good thing about my present work situation is that I can get away shaving just twice a week … 

Starting every week on Sunday with a morning shave on that day.
 
With my own mathematical equation, I figure that at age 65, I have shaved more than 7,500 times in my life. Don’t ask me how I came to that number, but it has to do with how many times I have shaved during my weeks of life at age 17 and beyond, and I think it is a pretty fair approximate.
 
Multiply that number by the 10 minutes that it takes me to shave, and I have wasted 75,000 minutes or so in getting the hair off my face.
 
So all told, I have wasted more than 1,200 hours of time while shaving, time I cannot get back.
 
That is more than 50 hours, so that is equal to more than two days of my life where I have been in the bathroom shaving.
 
What a waste of time!
 
But at least I have a clean face.
 
No beards for me, no way, no how.
 
But there has to be a better way …
 
I tell that to my razor every time I shave, but I don’t get any answers …
 
And I haven’t since 1974 or so, so I don’t expect to get any answers in 2022 or beyond.
 
I just wish it was all peach fuzz to me.