Miscellaneous, etc.

Sometime on Saturday morning I thought it would be a great idea to use a razor to shave, instead of my usual electric face-hacker, which does a good enough job but tends to burn hell out of my face if I’m not sufficiently prepared for it.

I can’t remember why I thought this was a stroke of brilliance, because every other time I’ve ever used a blade instead of an electric, I’ve always paid for it in blood. Bright, red, shallow, rich, coursing blood pumping out of my neck. It never mattered how gentle I was, what direction I went it, how much shaving lotion I slathered on — no matter what I did, I always came away looking as though I was a victim in a slasher movie.

The first time, as you might expect, was the goriest. This was before the days of Mach 3 and moistened strips and multiple blades that lift and separate and carry the hair away and all those technologies that are, from all accounts, just a bunch of bullshit anyway. All I had was a Gilette razor and some shaving foam, emboldened with the advice to shave with the grain, and everything would be fine.

It felt fine, anyway.

I scritched away with the blade, avoiding carefully the mole on my upper lip and the zits on my chin, trying my best to keep from having to wear any kind of clotted toilet paper on my face for the rest of the morning. My skin didn’t even burn especially, which I thought was a miracle, considering that I develop windburn if I stand in front of the freezer too long.

I didn’t find it to be the spiritual experience that I was expecting, to be honest. To hear some guys wax rhapsodic about the closeness of the shave, the contemplative silent joy of facial hair maintenance, the personal touch that only a blade can bring, I was half expecting to shave my own face off and find someone like Jude Law hiding underneath. Instead, as I rinsed my face off and walked down the hall, I decided that one form of shaving was much the same as any other.

I passed my Dad on the way to my room, and saw him do a double take as I caught his eye. “What the hell have you done to yourself?” he said, and half-reached to touch my neck.

“What? Did I miss a spot? What?”

My father’s eyes got a bit wide, then narrowed, then settled into almost a disappointed skepticism. “Your neck is bleeding. Your whole neck. It’s bleeding. Go and wash yourself off.”

In fact, my whole neck wasn’t bleeding — just the parts that had touched the razor. It was bright and red, and was more blood covering more surface area on my skin than I had ever seen in my life. I didn’t panic so much about the volume so much as the source, since a lot of small cuts wouldn’t have been nearly as serious as, say, a single slash pumping out my life’s fluids all over the place.

When I finally got clean, though, I couldn’t pinpoint any one place where I could’ve nicked myself. My throat looked pink, but I mostly attributed that to the shaving and the panicked scrubbing of a few minutes before — I couldn’t see any arteries hanging through the skin, or locate any gouts of blood spurting in time with my heartbeat.

As I watched, though, I began to understand. My whole throat was bleeding — it was one giant shaving cut. I stood and watched in the mirror as gore seeped from every square inch of my neck, like water beeing squeezed from a sponge, and reformed itself into a red sheet that trickled down towards my collar.

I didn’t leave the bathroom. I didn’t want anyone to see what I’d done to myself.

I sat the edge of the bathtub, watching my throat bleed. Panicky thoughts would fly through my head like seagulls, landing occasionally to peck at the weirdly serene calm I feel whenever I’ve injured myself in some stupid way. I wondered if I was going to bleed out, the victim of poorly practiced Gilette hand-razor techniques.

I thought about how to explain a 180 degree blood collar on my shirt.

I grabbed my throat with my palm and then looked at it, because for some reason I wondered what my hand would look like covered in my blood. Then I laughed.

Somewhere in there I realized I was getting a little insane, and maybe giddy from blood loss, so I jumped in the shower and hoped that the hot water would either sear my skin shut, or at least wash the blood away while I went into shock. When I finally emerged, I could see that a few dozen little scabs had formed all over the place, small enough that it looked like my normal shitty complexion.

The next day I discovered the micro-zit phenomenon, which is what I’m enjoying right now — along with the not-so-weeny cuts that gush your heart’s blood all over your bathroom, there are ultry-tiny wounds out of which blood cannot escape, but into which disgusting bacteria is happy to flood. Consequently, eeenie-tiny little yellow zits pop up all over the place, usually in small patches on sensitive areas, making you look like your face is melting off in wet chunks.

Age is no barrier to this. When you’re on public transportation sometime, just check out all the older guys with zits, and notice that they’re always in the same places — under the chin, on the neck, or along the jaw. All the results of hasty shaving or no aftershave, all studiously ignored by all the other men in the world who’ve suffered the indignity of being big, manly men with teeny, tiny little pimples.