Let It Go, Let It Grow: Doing The Movember Thing

Gidday readers. I’m Josh and I am the resident Marketing Wizzard here at Bigpipe Towers. You may remember me from such blog posts as the one where I used The Simpsons memes to explain why Bigpipe is awesome and/or get a job at Bigpipe. But today I want to talk about something serious: men’s health.

There’s no better way to get serious about men’s health than Movember, and there’s no better way to do Movember than by starting by shaving off your beloved facial hair. This is what I looked like before Movember started:

As you can see, I favour hiding my face behind a well-cultivated hair-garden. It’s been this way for quite a while. Occasionally I’ll shave, because summer is hot, or something, then I’ll remember that I don’t actually like how my face looks when I don’t have hair on it and I’ll concentrate really hard and grow it all back in a couple of hours. I wish.

Part of the reason I have a beard is because it’s so much easier than shaving. Shaving is a pain in the face. The razor cuts you up like a, uh, razor, it leaves you with a rash and reeking of stuff you got given for Christmas by a relative who clearly hates you, and if you decide to take a break for just one day your face takes on the characteristics of barbed wire, sandpaper, and a cat’s tongue all at once, somehow. It’s not worth it. Having a beard is just better. It’s like a nice soft springy pillow attached to your face that you can also store food in if you need to. It’s also probably the only body part you can get away with gently stroking in public. There are many reasons to grow a beard and very few not to have one, but Movember is a good cause, so I decided to lop it all off, in exchange for your kind donations.

I documented the process, because this is 2015 and if I hadn’t done it someone else probably would have flown a drone down, filmed the whole thing, and uploaded it to a shaving fetish website.

I took the clippers and headed for the deck, which has a neat little space between it and the fence that we use to store leaves, dirt, cat shit, and facial hair. I plugged in a couple of extension cords, and started shaving.

I quite like this one. I think this style makes me look somewhere between the bad guy from The Matrix and a 55 year old man who found Jesus in the water stains in his mother’s bath-tub.

I call this one “Young Walter White but in an alternate universe where he got cancer at age 32.” I also look quite a lot like my Dad, who, from 1990 through 2001, had glasses, a moustache, and would tell anyone within several metres about Jesus at the first opportunity. We didn’t watch The Simpsons when I was kid and Dad could never figure out why people kept calling him Flanders.

I call this one the “Reverse Hitler.” I worry for my future employment prospects putting this up, but I keep repeating to myself: “Good cause. Good cause.”

This is the final result. I hate it and so do you. Immediately after shaving I had a horrible urge to scrape my beard out of the gap between the fence and deck (avoiding the cat shit if possible) and superglue it back on my face, where it belongs. Fortunately my wife held me back with strong threats of divorce. I can’t wait to get my poor beard back, so if you have enjoyed this mad ramble and would like to donate to the men’s health awareness cause, you can (should!) do so here. 

Also you should probably sign up to Bigpipe, we have good broadband internets.