SeedSing Classic: I, Bald Man

I am a bald man.

I think I have made that pretty clear on the website and on the podcast. I am not complaining about this either. At first it was frustrating. I used to have dreadlocks, and when I cut those off, I grew my hair out like all millennials used to do. But I noticed in my mid twenties that I was losing my hair. The anger subsided quick, and I just kind of dealt with it. What else could I do.

When my hair was first thinning out I tried to keep the cut short, to kind of blend it in. That worked for a while. I still have some hair in my wedding photos. Pretty soon after my wedding and honeymoon, I began to lose more and more hair. At this time I started to shave it with an electric shaver. My wife would cut it, or I would do it from time to time. I would forget a lot, and my hair would look rough. But when it got to that point, boom I turned on the shaver and took care of business. After some time, after my kids were born, my wife took over shaving my head. She would shave my head and trim my beard. It was a two for one type deal.

One night I decided that I wanted to see what it looked like when I used a razor. I'm not talking anything fancy, no straight razors or anything like that. I would use a BIC, or something similar. And it worked. My wife and I did not know what I would look like, if I would look any different, and I didn't. Shaving your head totally bald doesn't look much different from a close shave. The only real difference is you can see all the knicks and cuts in your head. You also need to use some kind of aftershave, or those cuts get even worse. This has become my new norm now. I shave my head, usually, once a week. I will go on a long run, and my cool down is a shower and shaving my head.

I come here today to tell you a tale of "horror" about waiting too long to shave your head. Keeping a schedule is key. You need to stay on it. You need to make sure that you do it the same day every week. It is just like shaving your face for work. If you miss a week, it will be a pain. That happened to me today. We are getting work done in our home, and we needed to be out by last Sunday, the 14th. I figured I would shave my head when we got to my folks house. No big deal. Well, the moving of objects out of the bedrooms in my home, and setting things out of the way so the workers wouldn't have to, took way more out of me than I thought it would. I was pretty exhausted when we got to my parents house. Add on the fact that my kids had to be cleaned, and my wife and I did too, things got out of hand quick. I got our clothes in the house, moved the stuff into our room in the basement, gave my daughter a bath and decided I was going to sit down before showering. When I finally got around to cleaning myself, I was too tired to shave my head. I just decided to do it the next day.

Well, the next day turned into an entire week. I just kept forgetting. What with my new living situation, getting my kids to and from school, stopping by the house to check on it daily, training for a marathon and trying to get some sleep, shaving my head became an afterthought, until today. I finally had time. My kids are on spring break, my parents were willing to watch them and I had a scheduled rest day. I just finished shaving my head, and it took over 30 minutes.

It hurt. I have cuts all over my head. I had to slop on the aftershave, and it hurts. The water was freezing cold by the end in the shower. When I first started to shave, the razor felt like it was cutting grass for the first time in two years. I would move the razor two to three inches on my head, and the razor would fill up with hair. I had to keep cleaning the hair out. It took forever to get one side of the top of my head barely shaved. I kept going over the same spot three and four times with little to no movement. I finally got through the top part of my head, and the back was untouched. Mind you, I kept going over the back with the razor, it was too full of hair to work. I kept at it, changing midway through for a less dull blade, and that helped, but man did it scratch my head up bad. I could see blood on the white razor. I knew it was bad, and when I finally, thankfully, got my head shaved properly, my teeth were chattering, and my head was on fire with all the razor cuts and burns. It was brutal, but I got it done, and I feel okay now.

I am writing this today to say, if you are a bald man like me and you have decided to shave your head, stay on schedule. I do not want anyone to have to deal with what I did today. It was all on me, I did not stay on course. But I will from now on. This was not fun, and it took way too much time. Stay on schedule. That is the lesson I am trying to pass on today.

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast.

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