Face Bristles 1

I tried having a beard.  Years ago.  It is difficult but not impossible to be both well groomed and bearded.  I say beard, but I mean all manner of facial hair subsets right up to and including a little Charlie Chaplin mustache.  Hitler mustache?! Did you say Hitler mustache?  I've only been back one minute and already somebody is bringing up Hitler! That didn't take long.

Anyway I had the beard. Did the trimming. Shampooed my face. The whole thing.  On the plus side, you don't have to shave. That's x number of minutes less that it takes to prep for the world every morning. Also once it gets long enough it isn't scratchy. Ninety-nine percent of the time I end the day with Velcro face, and I don't mean the "loop" side.  Mrs. Crowndot does not complain aloud, and neither does she mention the just-shaved 1%, but when I had the beard back in our first decade together, she didn't complain (much) about that either.  (Just not a complainer, I guess.  Which may have something to do with why we've almost completed our fourth decade together.)

Where was I going with this?  Oh yes: Razor Blades.

But first, the minus side of the beard.  Why I Started Shaving Again And Have Been Clean-Shaven Since Some Time in the 1980s.  (Blogger's spell check thinks there should be an apostrophe in "1980s." There shouldn't.  NOT "one nine eight zero apostrophe ess." No apostrophe needed, unless you are talking about something like music, in which case it would be "one nine eight zero space ess apostrophe space rock hyphen and hyphen roll" which is practically a contradiction in terms anyway, except for "Africa" and a few others, but I trigress.)

It wasn't that the long whiskers were something that infants and toddlers grab onto while wrassling with dad; I could take that.  It wasn't the bother of cleaning up the area after a trim; small potatoes compared to the daily chore of shaving.  It was sour cream.  Specifically, the monstrous pile known as the Burrito Supreme.  When a mixture of guacamole, salsa, melted cheese, frijoles refritos, and sour cream gets squished out of a tortilla fissure and extrudes down your chin or up toward your nose, there is simply no way to feel clean again using anything less than a pressure washer or equivalent.  Even if there wasn't visible Burrito Supreme residue in the facial hair after application of a number of paper napkins, it just didn't FEEL clean.