Shave and a Head Cut

I was shaving the other day. In the shower. Part of my hygiene routine. I shaved my cheeks, chin and upper lip. Gotta get rid of the prickly sticklies. With a minimum of skin abrasions. It's always a battle between how close I want my shave and how much blood I want to lose. My blood lost, as usual.

And then I shaved my forehead. I've always had the Nixon crest. A blob of hair on my forehead with a receding hairline on either side. I called it my wiffle. Whenever I would get a haircut the barber would try to make it more pronounced for some reason. He would try to make it, you know, not ridiculous or something. He’d fail. I'd tell him to trim it. It's just a blob of hair hanging in front of my face. I’m not Carry Grant, after all. He'd cut a minuscule more off. I'd say trim it some more. He'd shave off a bit more. I'd say, fuck it. That's fine. Then I'd go home and cut it down to the scalp.

Lately the wiffle has deteriorated into two skid marks coming down my dome, like tire tracks on a snowy hill. OK. That’s enough of my dignity lost for this lifetime. Now I just shave it along with the rest of the pointless stubble on my head. I use a safety razor. You know, one with a double edged razor blade in it? It’s immensely cheaper than those Gillette ‘Track Infinity’ razors you can buy with their bewildering array of razor sharp gills and their celebrity endorsements. It works fine, for the most part. Though it does not like the continuous slope of my forward dome with its continuously changing tangent. You need an advanced degree in Calculus to figure out just how to hold the blade. This means I usually have to try several times on the upper sphere to get the dy/dx exactly right.

The other day the razor accidentally got a little loose, so the blade was kind of chattering in its holder. While I was integrating my differential, the blade shook a little loose and dragged, stuttering, across my head. It took a few passes before I realized what was happening.

Oops. Yes, I got several micro fine, hardly hurting at all but rather bloody and pronounced, scratches on one side of my head. I look like Mikhail Gorbachev.

Perestroika, anyone?