January 29th, 2008
My Face! My Valuable Face!
I have to say I’m pretty proud of myself for sticking with this bike-commuting thing. I’ve been doing it almost every workday for three months now, retroactively earning the new wheels I’ve already bought myself.
The only conditions under which I allow myself to take my car are when I have to transport something too large to handle on a bike, when it’s raining, or when the temperature outside gets below 32°. And that’s air temperature, mind you. I don’t go by the windchill. Mostly because, what kind of a pansy would I be if I went by “the windchill?” But also because, on a bike, you’re subjecting yourself to windchill far worse than what’s forecast anyway, so that number is basically meaningless.
On the 33° or 34° degree mornings, when I begrudgingly climb onto my steed and start pedaling, things tend to get quite blustery. Chilled air moving rapidly over naked hands and faces can have some extremely unpleasant results. Thus I got some gloves, and proceeded to grow myself a beard (often called “the gloves of the face”).
It’s really doing it’s job protecting me from the elements. In fact, the bushier it gets, the more like some sort of invincible superhuman I feel. So I decided I’d lay off the trimmer and let it grow out for while, a la that guy from Iron & Wine or Santa Claus.
And speaking of Santa Claus/beards (this is not yet another post where I go on and on about biking, here’s where I’m really going with it) for Christmas this year my sister got me a seriously manly shaving set. It has a brush and foam and some aftershave whose packaging informs you, very insistently, in 14-pt. type, that it is “alcohol-based” as if it actually has extra alcohol molecules infused into it somehow just so it burns you more and screw you and your “sensitive-skin face lotion.” The pièce de résistance, however is one of those old-school metal straight-headed “safety” razors and some shiny new blades. The razor is by a British company called, I kid you not, “Wilkinson Sword.” Upon receiving all this, I had the strong urge to shave my face.
I didn’t want to give up my beard, and therefore my imperviousness to the cold, just yet, but the area around a beard requires the occasional shave, so I’ve used my new set-up a few times for this, being very careful and deliberate with what is really just the implement that people nowadays use to scrape paint and stickers off of windows, at the end of a stick. The first four or five shaves went great. Nary a nick on my noggin. I got the hang of holding the handle at the proper angle right away, and it seems to get closer than today’s razors do.
Well, I guess I got cocky or took too much time between shaves and allowed my muscle memory to revert to what it does when I use my forgiving, pivot-headed Mach3, because two days ago I haphazardly picked up “The Sword,” placed it way up under my eye — ’cause sometimes those stray hairs sprout really high up on your face and don’t you act like I’m some hairy apeman and this only happens to me — and, for some reason, I moved it about half-an-inch to the right, horizontally, slashing the bejesus out of myself. It didn’t hurt at first since the blade was so freaking sharp, but it bled like crazy. I thought for a minute I might actually have to go for stitches, but it clotted quickly.
I’m sure this slice will heal and disappear eventually, but in the mean time I’m going to have some explaining to do. The size and vicinity of the wound are closer to an embellishment suggested by the Hollywood make-up artist’s handbook in the chapter about “pirate crews” than a shaving mishap. I’ve already had a few exchanges where someone’s asked me what happened and I’ve said “I cut myself shaving” and their gaze has shifted down to my puffy beard and I’ve explained “I was touching up around it.” At which point they’ve focused back on the length and shape of the cut, which I think might be physically impossible to get with a modern razor. “I was using one of those old-fashioned safety razors,” I say. Then they sort of step back and take in the whole picture and notice that the cut is way up under my eye, and I guess they either conclude that I’m lying and I run a knife-fighting ring in secret, or that I am a werewolf, and walk away.
What really sucks is this would be a pretty cool scar if I had a better story to go with it. Maybe I’ll just start telling people I took a crazy spill off of my bike. ’Cause I was riding to work carrying a big-screen TV. In a thunderstorm. In sub-zero temperatures.
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