As I sit here typing this, I keep catching the reflection of my own face in the screen. Look, there it is again. My own stupid face.
It is amazing how irritating I find this face. Not in a Piers-Morgan-punchable kind of way. It is more in annoyance that every charming facial feature I have been blessed with seems to have been accompanied by some ghastly defect. Take my eyes for example. At first I see these kind of endearing large puppy-dog globes, full of dreamy wonder. But then as a kind of counter-balancing retribution, I also have these burdening dark sags underneath which look like someone has taken the weight of the world off their shoulders, slung them into 2 big bags, then stapled them right under my eye-sockets. For every quality I see in my features, there always seems to be a corresponding flaw. I literally might as well just replace my own head with a big cardboard cut-out of the yin and yang symbol.
Take my hair too. I was blessed with a sea of thick, shiny locks. But the tide now seems to going out, and the dry barren wasteland beneath is creeping into view at an alarming rate. There was a time when my hair would just do its job of just hanging their all undemanding of any care or attention or anything. But now I am receeding, I have to bother being all self aware about it. There’s certain looks I simply can’t pull-off anymore. For starters the effortless bushy unkempt indie-kid style is a thing of the past. If my hair hits the lengths it was in the 90’s, limp wiry strands just hang unconvincingly down the dome of my head. It’s the equivalent of hugging a widescreen telly from behind to try and shield the local vicar from seeing a sex-scene. Three days without a wash, and with the additional greasiness it suddenly becomes the very stereotype of how the media might portray the image of a paedophile staring through the school gates. If anything, the dark circles on my eyes would only compliment this style. But sadly paedophile chic is not a very popular look at the moment.
I am not yet actually bald, but like I say, I need to show a degree of self-awareness about what I can and can’t pull off. I am just ‘gone’ enough to be aware that the number of styles I can model are steadily on the decline. I need to be prepared that perhaps one day whatever style I opt for will simply just be a vane pretension of denial; and then I’ll have no choice but to shave the remainder away.
I’d argue that in many ways being a receding man is probably worse than just being downright bald. Proper baldies have at least got past watching and worrying as their forehead coverage ebbs away. It’s like they got to point, shrugged their shoulders and just accepted that they’re better off slapped than fretting. I’ve even seen some of them seem really at ease about their lack of follicles. Like the baldies at festivals who unashamedly slap exaggerated dollops sun tan lotion over their head in full public view, and jovially apply it, as if it was Brasso or something.
But at the moment I am in standing in the middle of a confused, balding abyss, not quite knowing whether the recede intends to continue or not. If it stops now, I just might get away with a few shorter-on-top styles for years to come. If it continues I will have to know when to face facts and join the baldies for good. Either way, this summer it might be good idea to start pricing up the sun tan lotions, you know, just in case.
