phase 5

right now i am in, probably, phase five of shaving my facial hair off. this is not by design, mind you, but just because my beard trimmer was not sufficiently charged. one would think that by now we've been able to harness the power of a beard trimmer that can work on battery AND use the current flowing through itself as it's plugged into an outlet. pipe dreams, friends.

what i have been left to do is save up enough juice to get about 30 seconds worth of trimming in. my first initial trim had the power of about an hour and half behind it, so i really got a lot of work done. face sides - check. neck beard - check. goattee and wild sideburns - somehow even more wild.

so now i am left to play the waiting game...going to my computer for about eight minutes and then reentering the bathroom to see how much i can get off of my face before the razors begin tugging and pulling what is left of a majestic beard.

after the second phase i looked something very similar to colonel sanders, just missing a thin bowtie and looking a little more haggard. you could probably order chicken from me, it just may not be up to certain standards we all enjoy. (and most likely you could only pay in cash or some sort of gold trade.)

phases three and four have not done much to help me out. phase three made me cut one sideburn too short. phase four required me to forget about the beard and try and get this fucking sideburns situation figured out.

you see, in three days i'm going on a vacation with my girlfriend (sara brown!) and her whole family. while i know that they probably couldn't care less about my facial hair, trying to not look homeless is something that my mother has always tried to instill in me. (i think she's slowly thrown out all of my thrift store tee shirts over the years.)
so i need the sideburns to look good. and i also had a tragic accident this winter where i kept trimming up, up and up until i literally had no more sideburns to trim. if you're trimming up to the top of your ear you're either 1) amish or 2) a serial killer. or 3) a perfectly meshed combination of the two. so for about two weeks i tried and brush my side-hair down as far as possible. it didn't really work.

also, you really pay more attention to peoples' sideburns when you don't have any. i kept looking at friends and other prominent figures in my life to see if they were on my "no sideburns" team.

sadly, none of them were. only really, really pale guys with really, really gross bowl cuts. and let me tell you what, that is not a team that you want to be the captain of. and i feel arrogant enough to call myself their temporary captain.

so now we come to phase five. i'm trying to kill a lot of time so it gets a good charge; hopefully this will be my last attempt at shaving my beard off. it's already made me an hour and half late for shopping for new glasses. but no beard is better than no beard and no sideburns.

that kind of thing is like a phase seven thing...possibly even phase eight.