Me in my bathroom, with The Shiner ironically and coincidentally hung on the door. FYI, don't get stung in the eye by a hornet.
Hair. Science-forsaken hair. It’s everywhere in my bathroom. It’s sprinkled all over the edges of my porcelain tub, as well as the rim of my toilet, right over the Gerber stamp where the backboard meets the hoop. Shaving clippings cover both the top of my sink and the floor below, all while let’s-just-be-safe-and-call-it-leg hair is caked into the cracks of my auburn bathmat. I wouldn’t mind the fact that hair clogs the drain, if that were completely isolated. Even the shavings inside my toothpaste cap wouldn’t be the biggest thing in the world. It wouldn’t even bug me to know that hair was everywhere, if I couldn’t see it. What I cannot stand, however, is when hair’s omnipresence is completely apparent; when it reaches that level, I can’t help myself but clean.
That being said, what makes this situation so devastating isn’t that I have to clean once, or every so often. Instead, it seems to me like I’m cleaning up hair almost every day. I’m trying to put a clamp on an unstoppable force, and I am, by no means, an immovable wall.
I’m guessing most of you reading this can empathize with me to a certain degree; on the flip side, perhaps some of you are dismissive, because you don’t find cleaning up hair particularly aggravating. It is at this point I need to bring up the fact that I cut my own hair (here’s where all the geniuses I explain this to insert their standard “ohh so now it all makes sense” joke). I use electrically-powered clippers to take care of the sides of my dome-piece, and do my best to scissor up my scalp.
The key term there was “do my best,” because that type of effort has historically produced inconsistent results (although the worst trimming – really, that word sells it short – of all time was when my girlfriend Anna shaved off an entire chunk of hair down to bare skin). Sometimes I succeed, sometimes, well, you can probably fill in the end of that sentence for yourselves. These disappointing performances aren’t irreparable, but they result in an on-going reshaping. Even when I do do a halfway-decent job, I still touch up my hair every 3.95 days. This just adds to the pile – scratch that, pileS – of clippings littering my bathroom.
All this combines to create a mind-numbing state of affairs. No matter how sparklingly clean I get my bathroom, how devoid of hair it becomes, a day or two later, whether because of shaving, trimming, or full-blown hair-cutting, there will be strands of hair all over the place. Diabolical, is what it is.
This phenomenon isn’t exclusive to hair, but rather is ubiquitous in life. Certain things just naturally and incessantly ebb against your favor. Try to get enough sleep in one night to ensure you aren’t tired forever. Actually, my favorite analogy is with laundry, as it’s impossible to keep every article of clothing clean; even if you did laundry every day, you’re still not walking around naked, right? I suppose you could be, but then why would you have laundry in the first place!? HA!
As I reflect on this topic, which I know all of you have been desperate to hear my opinion about, it strikes me that this phenomenon is probably a good thing for life. It means there’s always something to do. Perhaps, if we could conclusively put an end to these things, we would move on to new activities and actually make some progress, but that seems unlikely. As I’ve previously quoted Adam Carolla as saying, life is “a way to sort of fool yourself with a bunch of distractions until you die.” Cleaning up hair, washing laundry, and catching up on sleep are just ways to keep ourselves distracted until we’re six feet deep. They’re never-ending system updates that serve as pistons in the treadmill of life.
At least, that’s how I feel about these general phenomena. But not with hair. No way hair is getting off that easy.
Fuck you, hair. I’ll get you some day.