There is a great, old, soft ice cream ("cree-mee") place in the town we used to live in, where they would always ask me, "Have you tried the large?" I would glance down at my belly: "Yes, I have tried the large." That would make a great T-shirt, I suggested, with a correctly-proportioned diagram of the towering confectionery placed over the tummy.
Knowing full well what I was sacrificing, I shaved the F-- out of myself this morning. Yesterday's shave was just too goddamn perfect. It was still awesome when I awoke, in fact, the little square-tipped stubble hardly casting a shadow, feeling like scratchy velvet on my hard, but supple and smooth, face.
Ding! Auto-dialectic engaged. I couldn't just lay down another layer of stratum corneum with Williams. I wanted to know what this new face was really made of. Could it be pushed further than before? Jeffrey Tucker's words assumed the echoey voice of Eric Cartman in my head: "Mushy... unresponsive," as I dug into my Arko-"perfect" prep with gusto. After two passes, I found I could still extrude hair and get strong traction, using extreme leverage. So I got my answer -- that was unusual.
My instinct was to avoid alum and go to splash afterward, but I did both. The alum was worse, stinging the hell out of my neck. There was still enough deep epidermis to accommodate the penetrating solvent; I didn't back it off.
Oil, powder, and moisturizer didn't look natural at all, on a shiny, skin-planed surface. I looked like a made-up corpse; I had a dead-man's shave. Made sense; I had literally just killed my face. (Rinsed it all off and put on cocoa butter, later in the day.)
But there was only one weeper, in the toughest whiskers under my chin, and I didn't feel any burn for two hours. It passed an hour later. Isn't that wonderful? Isn't that a great shave?
NO. Hear me well, learners. That stubble is going to come back just as fast, no matter how glassy the surface of your skin. This is not the kind of "smooth" you want.
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