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THIRTY MINUTE MUSTACHE

I was shaving with an electric shaver.  I don’t like to shave.  Wait, that’s not true.  I don’t mind shaving.  It’s actually fun and easy.  Well, not fun but it’s easy.  What I don’t like is the immediate contrast of being stubbly and beardy and then not.  I feel like everyone is looking at me saying, “Oh, he shaved.”  I don’t like to draw attention to myself in my appearance.  I mean, I like to look cool, but there’s something about people being able to know right away that I made a change that irks me.  That’s why I hate getting haircuts too.  I hate looking like I got a haircut.  It feels childish to me.  “Oh, look at me everyone I made my hair all nice.”  No.  I hate that.  I sit in the haircut chair and say, “Can you make it look like I don’t have a haircut?”  Then they look at me smile and say, “Sure,” and immediately take out the buzzer and start shaving my head off.  I’ve yet to find the right combination of words to get the kind of haircut I desire.  My father once told me that if you say the word “short” to a barber that is all they hear.  Meaning, not to say, “I don’t want it short.”  It should be known to that I’ve only ever gone to $10 haircut joints.  What am I going to do, pay $45 to look like I didn’t get a haircut?
           I was shaving with my electric razor.  Things were moving along nicely.  I was watching my face get clean one section at a time.  Half bearded, half not.  Sometimes I pause and just look at that.  I see the clean side and in contrast to the non-clean side I wonder how I was walking around with that all over my face.  So I continue to remove it.  I go right side to left side like a nice Jewish boy should.  While I was working my way up the home stretch the shaver made a zipper zoom noise and then went from a high pitched flowing buzz to a more and more declining rolling sputter.  The force of removing my facial hair was diminishing and I panicked to finish up.  It was still coming off but not as easily.  It sputtered slower and slower and I managed to remove it all until the razor finally gave up and totally conked out.  It was still turned on, but it was off, dead.  I looked at it a little bit, banged it, turned it off and on, thought about how long I had it… and then looked up to the mirror to make sure I got it all.  “Holy shit!  I still have a mustache!  I didn’t finish and I’ve got a mustache!  I don’t want one of these!”
            For the same reason I never got an earring, I don’t want a mustache.  What do I do?  Is this why people have mustaches?  I know there seems like a really simple solution here, which is to shave it off with a regular razor.  Yes, that is a simple solution.  The problem is, I don’t have one.  I know that leads to another very simple solution:  They’re very cheap, go buy one and shave it off.  Ok, yes, but I have to go get one WITH A MUSTACHE!  Everyone I see along the way is going to think I have a mustache ON PURPOSE!  They’re going to think I left the house thinking, “Alright, great, lookin’ good!”  That’s not good it’s terrible.  And the cashier…I’m going to be buying a razor with this thing on my face.  She’s going to look right at it.  I can’t only just buy a razor while having a terrible mustache.  That’s like when I need toilet paper I always have to buy something else with it.  Otherwise I’m saying to everyone, “Hey, I’m going to be wiping my ass with this soon.”  What else can anyone think of about you if that’s the only thing you’re buying?
            What can I do?  Can I wear a mask?  Scrape it off with a knife?  There’s got to be an old disposable razor somewhere.  Maybe I’ll never go out until the surrounding beard grows in.  No, I have to be somewhere in 45 minutes!  I can’t be there with a mustache!  What it came down to is either I try and look around for some sort of razor, hope to find one within the time I had left or leave (with a mustache) get a razor come back and get rid of it.  As soon as I realized I needed to buy shaving cream too I knew I had to leave, right away.  I could not show up to where I had to be looking like this.  I just had to go.
        There’s a time in everyone’s life when you need to stop worrying so much about what other people think or what you think they are thinking and get up and do what you need to do.  For the most part, I have been doing that.  I just didn’t think I’d need to do it with a mustache.  So I sucked it up, put on my coat, tried to maneuver my scarf to shield my face, went back into the bathroom, looked at myself again, wrapped the scarf around my head, took the scarf off and went outside.  “Hello world, my name is Jon and I have a mustache…Holy fuck, do I know that person?  Keep walking…look down, look down.”  I made it to the Duane Reade unscathed.
          “Oh no, the razors are behind the counter…I have to talk.”  I went to get the shaving cream first in the hopes that maybe there would be other razors near it.  There wasn’t any but that’s when things changed.  This is funny!  I laughed out loud when I picked up the shaving cream.  “I have a mustache,” I thought to myself.  I’m “mustachioed.”  “Hello, I’m mustachioed at the moment, please leave a message.”  It became easy, like other ridiculous episodes in my life.  I get afraid during the events leading up until I’m actually there it becomes easy and in some cases it becomes fun.  I should know this by now.  Maybe I can’t have one without the other.  I brought up the shaving cream, on my way I grabbed a roll of toilet paper and put them down on the counter.  I said hi to the cashier and she started ringing me up.  Then I said “And oh yeah, I need one of those…I guess, Mach 3 razors, ‘cause look what happened, I was home shaving with my electric razor and it died out.  I was left with a mustache.”  She laughed and she said she liked it and turned around and got the razor.  While she finished ringing me up I was thinking, “Wow, this person only knows me as having a mustache,” and that blew my mind for a little bit.
        I walked home with my head up, sort of.  Didn’t see anyone I knew and no one really looked at me.  I got back inside and shaved it off with time to spare.  I looked in the mirror at my now normal face and thought, “Shit, I look like I just shaved.”