July 27, 2004

• I shaved off my goatee.

  My goatee never was very large, and always got too scruffy too soon. I'd run the 1/2" clippers through it and tame it into shape, but even then it always grew sideways. Meaning it never actually looked like I had trimmed it.

  I'd had the goatee for at least a decade. Back when I had long (LONG) hair, I discovered that people didn't mistake me for a woman if I had a goatee. There was one guy behind the counter at McDonald's who said 'Yes, ma'am,' saw the goatee, and said, 'Oh, sorry. Didn't see your goatee.' And that's when I became a guy who had a goatee, rather than a guy who might keep his goatee.

  But the long hair is gone (transformed, I am told, into a wig for chemo patients). Now I have a buzz cut, because it's so easy to maintain without having to go to the barber or stylist, or whatever term you use for such people nowadays.

  Yesterday I walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, and realized that I needed to trim my goatee. And during the time between that realization and getting the clippers out of the hall closet, I decided to cut the whole thing off and enter the manly, macho world of stubble. (Anyone who knows me knows that the thin caterpillar's-worth of goatee is the only place where my beard actually grows.)

  So ZAP. It's gone. And in the aftermath, as I looked at myself in the mirror, I realized something else about myself: I have a double chin.

  Crap.

  • 2:55 pm
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