If You Think My Garden Looks Bad, You Should See My Back

I wonder if we’d mind so much getting older if it didn’t come with the decline of our bodies? 

Yes, I resent getting older due to the inevitability of death; although I might also resent getting older if I were immortal. Life without the certainty of death would lose a lot of meaning - if you get a banana split every day, eventually you begin to not like banana splits. Put another way, to paraphrase an old joke: somewhere in the world there is the most beautiful and alluring person alive, and they have a partner who has had just about enough of their shit.

So I don’t want to be immortal, but I think I could probably live with not becoming (more of) a physical wreck as I age.

Alas, the evidence that this is not the way life works is accumulating faster than crud between the keys of an aging keyboard. Yes, that is a metaphor. No, I could not bear to give a real life example instead of a metaphor. Yes, I’ll bet you’re glad I opted for a metaphor.

Take hair. If you think God doesn’t have a sense of humor, take a look at the cruel joke that is hair redistribution for many men as we age. Yes, “tall,” “dark” and ”handsome” made the podium for desirable male traits, but “a great head of hair” missed a medal by… well, by a hair.

So, it is painful enough that many of us suffer the indignity of one of our most marketable traits literally falling off of us, starting sometimes before we’ve had the chance to complete the big sale. No, the real twist of the comb is that, as we lose hair on our heads, we begin gaining hair on our ears, eyebrows, nostrils, shoulders and, yes, our backs.

It’s like when ocean currents pull most of the sand from one beach and deposit it further down the island on another beach, except we don’t have taxpayers willing to foot the bill for little Matchbox bulldozers and trucks to grab the hair from down island and return it to its original location.

Evolutionarily, it makes sense. At some point, the entire function of hair becomes less about attracting women and more about repelling women so they’ll pick a younger and more fit mate. As someone who found their mate (the lovely and exceedingly tolerant Stacy), this evolutionary principle doesn’t bother me. 

But now that Stacy and I are together, is there any way to scale back the production of this natural defense against being attractive? It’s exhausting.

(Side note: men, in addition to the desirable traits in a partner of ”humor,” “looks” and ”brains,” I’d like to suggest “tolerance” as a worthy fourth, because you will need it when God decides it’s time to dim your AQ - attractiveness quotient - in any number of ways.)

Fig. A: I’m not saying this is what my back looks like. I’m also not not saying that.

And the wartime footing of my hair-production capacity is exhausting. If the hair on my head had grown at the pace of the hair on my ears, eyebrows, nostrils and back, I’d still be an indentured servant to a barber, because no way I could have afforded to pay cash. I can’t keep up. As I trim the hair on my ear or eyebrows, it’s growing so fast that it’s longer when I’m done than when I started. 

This leads to some bad decisions. Forget the car. If I’ve had more than three drinks, then there ought to be an automatic deactivation switch on my hair trimmer. Sometimes In the morning I look like I fell asleep during a party, and my friends didn’t have any sharpies but they did have a Braun trimmer. 

Theodore Roosevelt once said: “We must either wear out or rust out every one of us. My choice is to wear out.” I would like to think I will wear out instead of rust out. But I’m afraid neither is my destiny - I’m likely to end up succumbing to overgrowth.

HEY, that gives me an idea: Round Up for hair! Hear me out…