My Jackass Moment

I've always thought I'd probably look pretty good bald. I'm talking pate-bald, not just hair-line challenged, which I'm already dealing with. I have a well-shaped head, the sort that I think would look pretty good completely shaved or with a light dusting of fuzz. Not everyone can pull it off, mind you. For every Patrick Stewart or Sinead O'Connor, there are loads of celebs who would have no business shaving their heads. Their skulls are too pointy or maybe have a secret sagittal crest that they really need hair to cover up. Granted, I can't think of many off the top of my head (HAH!), though that shaved comedian, whose name I can't recall, who's often on Collin Quinn's chat show on Comedy Central comes to mind. I actually don't know if he'd look better with hair, but he needs something.

With that knowledge of my own aesthetic skull-shape in mind, whenever my messy head O' hair gets too annoying to deal with, I start looking longingly at my beard trimmer, wondering what magic I can do with it to make my hair issues go bye byes.

I've actually gone that route once before. Just after I graduated college, I wound up shaving my head down to the nub to see how I liked it. I'd sported shoulder-length hair for a couple of years before that, so I was able to justify that I was trying to achieve some kind of balance by going super short for a while. It worked out okay, I guess. Other than a week's worth of odd-stares from my co-workers at the time, there were few ill-effects. (Hell, I worked in radio, where it shouldn't matter what you look like.) The added bonus was that it was terribly easy to fix in the morning. Just had to run my head under the tap, smooth down any stray bits and hit the road. Within a few months, through, I'd grown it back out and resumed my quest for a haircut I could live with.

I will say, the messy look actually works for me pretty well. I like it a lot and it is my wife's favorite look for me thus far. In fact, the messier it is the better she likes it. I prefer combining messy top with military-short shaved sides and back, but she thinks it makes me look like a skinhead so I've avoided going quite that short for a while.

That is... until yesterday.

Monday night night I got it in my noggin that I could use a bit of a trim and had started eyeing my beard trimmer again, thinking it could just about pull off the job. It's the kind with the dial adjustable hair-guard, allowing me to set it to trim hair anywhere from an inch down to root level with the click of a dial. I looked at the settings and judged that the longest setting on it, setting 9, would probably get the hair short enough without going too extreme. I even tried it out on the sides of my head, near the temples and it cut just fine. Looked great too--all blended and nice. Still, I was hesitant to do my whole head at that setting. Cutting one's own hair can be a dangerous thing to do.

Trouble was, that Siren trimmer kept calling to me. So yesterday morning I returned to the bathroom to do some more experimenting.

With the trimmer set to setting 9 I trimmed over the entire sides and back of my head. I could see that it was indeed trimming hair, but very little visual difference was made. Seemed pretty safe. I did most of my trimming in the bathtub where the hair could fall for easy cleanup later. After a few minutes of this, though, I decided that using the angled mirrors at the sink would be a better idea and well worth the trouble to clean up loose hair afterward if I did a better job as a result. I went on over and started tenuously clipping near my widow's peak. Looked pretty good so far. Unfortunately, this particular trimmer doesn't dump the excess hair very easily. It tends to collect within the clipper guard, so I had to keep taking the guard off to empty the hair out. Getting the guard back on can be kind of tricky, too, as it was hard to tell when the guard was actually back on with the dial on setting 9. To really do it right, you need to dial it down to setting 5, or so, just to get the guard on, then dial it back up to start shaving again.  This I did. And, naturally, I forgot to dial it back up to 9 afterward.

"BRAAAAAAAT!" the trimmer screamed.

"YAHHHHHH!" I then screamed, yanking the trimmer away. "YAHHHHHHH!!!!" I screamed again as I saw my handiwork. In that one quick moment, I'd shorn a two inch long patch down to the scalp on the right side of my head, exactly where the hairline would normally part. Oh, shite, and it was ugly too! I looked like a victim of the Shaver Shark, from Jackass. This was not the sort of thing that could be hidden without resorting to a hat.

I stood there cursing for a while, just staring at it and feeling quite justifiably like a dumbass.

WHY?!!! WHYYYY?!!!! WHYYYYYYY???!!!!!

After the initial shock of my self-mutilation wore off, I realized there was nothing else I could do but finish the job. I can't exactly go walking around with a damn landing-strip shaved into the top of my head, so I figured I might as well commit to the notion of semi-baldness again. I set the trimmer to 7, which would leave me with around 1/2 inch of growth, and started at it.

It took half an hour or so to finish the job, plus some touch ups after I'd showered. When I was done, I certainly had much shorter hair. I'm not bald, per se, but if you put me and a classic G.I. Joe from the 70s side by side, we'd have about the same fuzz ratio.

Does it look good, though? Eh. Maybe. It's not bad. Granted, I'm still a little shocked when I catch my reflection, but not because it's horrid. It's just SO different than before. In fact, I suspect it would probably look better if it were even shorter, but I'm not yet willing to test that theory.

The real question is: How's the wife gonna deal with it?  I take comfort in the fact that she still has two more weeks on her current rotation and I won't likely see her until that's over. Maybe by then it will have grown out a bit. 

I tell ya... I completely shaved my goatee off a couple of years ago. It was the first time my wife had ever seen me without any facial hair. She had, in fact, dared me to shave it in the first place. Afterward, she spent an hour following me around and laughing at me. And she snickered every time she looked my way for two more days. I can only imagine the gale of mirth she's gonna let loose upon seeing me now. She only THOUGHT I was a skinhead before.