the danger of being hairless

3 May 2006
This weekend, I shaved my chest.

Actually, that’s not true.  I trimmed my chest hair.  But there is a lot less hair now than there was before. 

I did this purely out of boredom.  One of the things I learned very early on in college is that procrastination and grooming go hand in hand.  I recall spending hours in my common room, working on papers, and taking breaks to trim my beard/goatee.  This was always a nice break, I thought, though I have no idea why.  But when faced with the prospect of finishing that thing that I spent all weekend writing (trying…not…to…mention…), I decided that it was the ideal time to do some serious chest hair grooming.

I am a very hairy man.  Not only do I have a beard, but I am essentially a walking rug.  Actually, rug is not exactly right.  ”Walking hairball” is closer, but that isn’t funny.  How about this: Have you even seen one of those shows on the Discovery Channel that show a bear in a stream, looking for salmon?  That’s what I look like when I come out of the shower.  A bear leaving his salmon stream.

The only body hair grooming I regularly do is on the ol’ mons pubis (from the Latin meaning “mountain of pubes”) and my back.  My short and curlies are actually immaculately groomed.  I take special care of them because I want them to serve both as a beckon of hope and a reward for any lady that dares to make her way down there.  A clean cut pubic area says, “Thank you for making it this far.  I know that by now you’ve seen more hair than you thought possible on any non-ape being, but look how nice and well-trimmed my pubes are!  Doesn’t that make you feel at least a little bit better?  I bet you were expecting a rainforest with its own ecological system down there!  Like, jaguars and birds and raccoons running around and shit!  Am I right?”    

As for the back, my struggles with back hair have been well documented on here.  I do not shave my back because I know that shaving only encourages regrowth.  Nor do I wax my back because I refuse to let some chick I don’t know rip hair follicles off my enormous back, which one could land a plane on (and in times of war, planes have landed on my back).

Instead, I invented a device for back hair grooming.  The device consists of my beard trimmer, sans attachment, fastened to a wooden ruler with a series of rubber bands.  In this way, I can basically trim my back hair into near-oblivion and cover a great area, since this apparatus is essentially an extension of my beard trimmer.  I’ve thought a lot about this and I believe this is the best possible solution to the problem.  If I were to shave my back hair, stubble would appear in less than three hours.  By grooming it, I trim the hair down so short that a) you can’t see it and b) you can barely feel it.  And when you do feel it, instead of being rough to the touch like sandpaper, it’s actually quite soft and lovely, like petting a doberman or a chihuahua. 

The problem is that I have some hard to reach areas.  Fortunately, after years of practice, I’ve become quite agile and am able to get most spots.  If not, I enlist my roommate Brian to help.  This is probably what I will most about him when he’s gone.  I don’t think he will miss it so much.  Actually, I know he won’t miss it.  At all.

(Also, it’s a good thing that Brian does not read this blog.  Because I think he’d be pretty pissed that I just told a couple thousand people that he sometimes shaves my back.  And if he does read it, expect a retraction later.)

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that prior to this weekend, I had never made any effort to trim my chest hair.  I let it go, accumulating twenty-six years of growth.  I knew a man should trim his pubes and his back, but I thought it was ok to let the chest hair grow freely and without restraint. 

Yet that changed after ten or so hours of sitting in front of a blank Word document, watching a cursor blink.  During one particularly rough session, I got up from my chair, went into the bathroom, turned the beard trimmer on, and said “Fuck it.”

My beard trimmer has nine different settings, 1 being short (the length of those beards that Hispanic and black people have), 9 being long (about the length of the hair on my head).  I started at 9 but I didn’t start clearing some serious ground until I hit 5.  But when I hit 5, the hair started flying off.

While doing it, I felt pretty good about it.  I could see a major difference in the amount of my chest hair.  Also, it felt nice and kinda tickled. 

So I happily sheared myself, the hair falling in clumps into the sink and the bathroom floor.  When I was finished, I collected all these clumps and put them in the toilet.  Then I peed on them and didn’t flush.  I wanted Brian to see what I made when he came home (and when he did come home, he asked, “Jesus – did you shave your head in here?”).

After I dropped the clumps of chest hair in the toilet and peed on them (and yes ladies, I am single), I looked at my new body in the mirror.  And I was horrified. 

The only way I can explain it is like this.  For the past nine years, I had never really been “shirtless.”  Since 18, I’ve had a thick, lustrous layer of hair on my chest, masking my true body shape.  Of course, I knew I was fat, but my fatness was always secondary to my hairiness (meaning, if one were to see me naked, their first thought, aside from “Is that a penis or a purple light switch?” would be “My god you’re hairy!” not “My god you’re fat!”).

But with much of the chest hair gone, there I stood in front of the mirror, truly shirtless for the first time in a long time.  And in short, I was afraid. 

I looked fat.  I look fat.  Fatter than I thought.  Much fatter than I thought.  There was no more hair to conceal my girth.  Finally, I could see my gut and man boobs in all their ignominious glory.  All the flab, the white, the soft, the hanging; gross, gross, gross, gross.  Gross.

I walked into my bedroom and started doing push-ups.  Not real push-ups mind you, but girl push-ups.  I ripped off like ten of those and as I laid then on my cold bedroom floor, shirtless and (kinda) hairless, I made a promise to myself: I have to lose weight.

I am going to Jamaica in three weeks.  I will be there for a whole week.  I am the best man at a wedding.  After that, I have my five year college reunion, where I might mention, that, I don’t know, I was named one of the 20 Most Handsomest Men of All Time, have just finished writing my memoirs, am developing a television show for the greatest network ever, and remember when I asked you to go to a nice dinner at Vinny Testa’s with me but you said you had plans than I saw you getting fingerblasted in the mods by that senior who shit himself at the hockey game?

These are all events that I should look good for (or at least, look as good as I can for).  I thought previously that I was looking pretty ok.  However, now that I am less hairy, and therefore much more fat, this is not the case.

So once again, I’m altering my diet.  No, I am not giving up meat like I did in March.  But I promise for the next three weeks, I am going to watch what I eat.  I am going to give up sweets.  I am going to drink more vodka (probably a lot more vodka) and less beer.  I may even work out.  I will probably throw up.  But any way you cut it, I am going on a diet for the next few weeks.  Because I am committed to looking good/better.     

(At least until my chest hair grows back.)