Why I shave my perfectly hairy head
Kevin Niederman
COLUMN LIKE I SEE 'EM
I would recommend head shaving to any and all who read this. Women too.
When your hair is long, you reach up and feel your hair—that's all you feel. Hair. Just a fistfull of hair.
No matter how long it might get, all you get to feel is more and more hair. This all changes if you cut it off.
To start, I shave my head practically down to the bone.
If I can't find a barber, I buzz my hair down to nothing with an electric trimmer and then take a typical shaving razor and rake my head raw, shaving both with and against the grain. I know it's short enough when I can't feel any hair and my once pleasant shampoo lights my newborn cranium aflame, like a phoenix from the ashes.
It’s at this point I’ve entered the first stage of baldness: smooth. I feel like a psychic rubbing my crystal ball. Hamlet holding his skull. Like Brad Jacobs polishing his stone.
This stage is short-lived however, as less than twelve hours later, I've entered stage two: Velcro stage. This stage is characterized by ever so slight hair growth with just barely nanometers of hair.
It's like that scene in the old Tobey MaGuire Spider-Man movie where Tobey sees all the little hair harpoons erupting from his thumb. My head feels like sandpaper, and everything sticks. Putting on a shirt becomes as impossible as solving a Rubik's cube made out of thorns and the suffering of neglected puppies.
Next comes the toothbrush phase.
You know when you wet a toothbrush and then you run your thumb across the bristles and it just sprays water everywhere? That, except my head. It's a lot of fun, even if it aggravates everyone around me.
About a month after that comes regular hair phase, and that's exactly what it sounds like. There are no more phases after that, and it just keeps growing until one day I decide to have a mohawk for a day or carve something offensive into the back of my head before taking the razor to it and starting from square one all over.
I mostly shave myself raw to enjoy those few months of the progression of hair growth. That rapid change keeps my hands happy.
I touch my head a lot, so that evolution is an amazing experience to go through. It's the only reason I can fathom why girls shave their legs. It’s just so cool. Why not try the head, too?
It's already a thing to shave half your head, which means by next year it will be a thing to shave your whole head. Better to get ahead of the curve now, be a trend setter.
Haven't you seen V for Vendetta? G. I. Jane? It looks great. Natalie Portman and Demi Moore know what's up, and they're like, sixty.
Kevin Niederman is a junior nursing major hailing from Santa Rosa CA, about an hour north of San Francisco. He enjoys cartoons, hats, and driving ridiculous distances for food that has the potential of being amazing.