Naked Follicles
So my last post talked about how time seems to speed up as we get older. The older we get the more we find ourselves asking, “Where did all the time go?” But that’s not the only thing that goes. For me, one of the main things that’s going is my hair. But the hair doesn’t just go all on it’s own; before the follicles go their color goes.
Actually, when I think about it, that’s kind of backwards. Sure my hair is going grey, but it’s not the parts that have gone grey that are going away. My hair first started going grey when I was twenty-six. Okay, God is reading over my shoulder as I write this and he complains that that’s not strictly accurate. What happened at twenty-six is that the hair at my temples went grey. Nothing else lost its color until sometime in my early forties. And before God starts splitting hairs over my claims of color, let me just say that my hair has never been on the dark side, so while the parts that have changed are technically grey, they’re close enough to white that you could call them that as well.
But anyway, I was saying that the notion that the color goes and then the hair goes is kind of backwards. What seems to actually be happening is a two-pronged attack; part of the hair turns grey, and other parts of the hair fall out. And actually, if you want to get technical, all of the hair falls out, it’s just that in going bald, not all of it then grows back in. And again, “but,” but what I actually wanted to talk about now is not the going bald part but the going grey part. In my case, the grey at the temples has spread somewhat, but this just means that all of the temples are grey rather than merely the dashing streak that I had in my twenties. As to what else of the hair on top is going grey, pretty much nothing. My beard, on the other hand, is now nearly completely white.
And that just seems wrong. Going grey is a sign of growing old, but it’s my youngest hair that is losing its color. I pestered God about this and he gave me the kind of story that you’d expect out of a con man. He told me that since men only have beards for at most about four fifths of our life, that that means that the beard’s lifetime is shorter than our lifetimes. So that means that every year that goes by for me is like a year and a quarter going by for my beard. It’s sort of like dog years but not as extreme. Anyway, this means that relatively speaking, by the time I reached a certain age, my beard was older than me, and so it going grey first was actually the expected thing. Even though it makes a certain amount of sense, I still think God is probably just pulling my leg on this one. What I need to do is to start looking at pictures of older men naked. If the theory is true, I should see that first the beards go grey, then, in even older men, the underarms and groin, then finally the hair on top. I can’t wait to get started. Now I not only get to look at porn but I get to say that I’m doing it for God. Not bad. Not bad at all.
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