Runaway Razor

There are some things you just shouldn't do early in the morning, and today I learned that shaving your pubes is one of them.

I'm a pretty hairy guy by most standards. I don't have hair on my back or shoulders, but it starts on my chest and runs strait down to my toes, so I try to keep it in check. What that entails is a monthly grooming session with my clippers.

This is actually a little more involved than you may think. You can't just stand in your bathroom and start clipping away, there would be a ring of hair on the floor like some sort of demonic pube christmas wreath. It would take all day to clean that up. If I lived in, say, the Arizona desert, I would be tempted to do this outside, but living in a city that's really not practical.

For a while I used to stand over the toilet and let the hair fall in the bowl, but about 1/3 of the hair would still miss and end up on the floor. I've found that the best method is to stand in the shower (with the water off, obviously) and trim away with the number 2 guard on. I usually start with my side burns, do my chest and stomach, then move on to my pubes. The theory is that the blades magically clean themselves between the time I shave my nuts and when it's time to do my sideburns again a few weeks later.

The sideburns, chest, and stomach all go quickly. You need to be a little more careful when you get to your bits and pieces, though. I assume you all know what hair clippers look like. They are electric sheers with interchangeable guards that attach to the blades. The guards are plastic but can feel like shark's teeth of they catch your scrotum, so you can't just whip it around any which way. You need to go slow and be very deliberate with direction, pressure and angle. If you stray with any of these variables you can end up with a punctured sack or scraped shaft, and it goes without saying that you want to avoid that at all costs.

So this morning I was standing naked in my shower stall clipping my chest hairs, shivering because it was cold as fuck in my house, when the front of the clipper guard caught the skin and backflipped off the blade. The blade then lurched forward and bottomed out against the top of my stomach, carving a three inch long diagonal swath. In the fifteen years I have been doing this I've never had that happen, but the first thing I thought was "I really shouldn't be doing this before my coffee." It was true.

I only had two options at this point. I could either leave the strip there and look like an ass for a few weeks, or shave the rest of my stomach and look like an ass for a few weeks. I shaved the rest off and man do I look like an ass. Not only that, I'm just now learning that it burns like a motherfucker to shave your stomach down to the skin. Jesus, who knew?

When I was done shaving my stomach with no guard, I now had what looked like a pair of hair trousers. I never realized how much that happy trail down the center of my belly tied together my chest and pubes. I tried to fade in the hair on my upper-pubic region but I just got silly watching myself carefully try to arc the clipper up and away from my dick. In a moment of pure idiocy I compounded the problem by trimming my chest and pubes down to a "1" guard, which is like two days of facial stubble. Sweet look I have going here. Good thing it's winter and my shirt can stay on.

This will no doubt hurt my dating prospects in ways I can't yet imagine.