07-070
Read This Before
You Shave
Although I present myself to the public as an individual of high-brow interests and scholarly pursuits, it is much more likely I will be found lurching over at my desk with my nose in the paper, attempting to understand what Blondie sees in that Dagwood. In fact, I have been known to become stricken with illiteracy in mid-sentence, but only in the middle of “smart” stories, or at the mere mention of the word “fricative”. (Woops!)
Things being as they are, I find myself guilty of occasionally putting aside certain articles of importance, usually for something a bit more tropical. (I’m sorry, I meant topical. How embarrassed I must feel.) So it is with great gusto and a sense of complete moroseness and doom that I pass on to you one such item that somehow slipped through unnoticed by me, probably because it still does it’s makeup in that bland “old fashioned” way.
According to a Professor Clydesdale, fewer U.S. men are growing hair on their faces now than in any other epoch of history. What once was a symbol of manliness and virility is now quite unfashionable. And what of it, you say? Settle down or I’ll kick that tricycle right out from under you.
The problem at hand is that this isn’t just an issue that we can pooh-pooh away. One man might say, “well I like my face cleanly shaven,” while his wife, busy in the other room ironing the same pair of pants for the last hour, may never realize she forgot to plug the iron in. But this gentleman (who wears wrinkled pants to work) would see that this change of behavior would signal the decline of the American economic structure as we know it today.
We would be thrown into a wild beard deficit. We would then have to borrow beards from other hairier nations just to keep up morale. This would leave America a nation of men wearing fake beards held on by elastic straps around the back of their heads. And tell me who would be intimidated by us then? We would just be sitting ducks, waiting to be trampled.
And that man, with all this data, would end up very melancholy, reminiscing about the good old days when his coworkers called him “wrinkle-slacks” every time he got up to use the lavatory.
I could not accept that fate, so I decided to do my own study. As any study in societal behavior begins, I started with the man on the street. He was very surly, but he did direct me to the “man on the street”. This man was very tall and I forgot to bring my stool, so I abandoned any hope of communicating with him. Then, after much ballyhoo, I got in touch with the “man-on-the-street”. He wasn’t much of a talker. I also think he may have stolen my wallet, but I just don’t know how to approach the topic with him. Fricative.