I've Got Leghairs in My Eyebrows

I wish I could take credit for being the first person to have put these words together in this particular order. Never before have six words created such a clear mental image in my mind. I wish I could draw for you what I see when I read that sentence aloud. You are probably fortunate that I am quite inept at art, because frankly, it’s pretty clear the type of image it creates, and it’s even more evident that it’s gross.

Grooming in general is such a tremendous pain in the ass. I’ll never understand how the makeup companies have convinced people of the need to rip out eyebrows and then draw them back on with a pencil. One of my personal beefs is shaving, largely because it just plain sucks. It’s no wonder really. Think about it at the most basic level. You are putting a sharp blade…on your skin. What group of Darwinist fools conjured up this scenario? If you screw up, your body has no problem telling you how much of a dumbass you are by rushing pints of blood to a cut smaller than a Tic-Tac. There’s a reason one of the weapons in Clue is a knife.

For the moment, let’s ignore the fact that having hair is part of being a mammal. Let’s also ignore the fact that humans are the only creatures vain enough to find it necessary to chop off stuff that purportedly exists keeps us warm. (When was the last time you saw a chimp, or whale for that matter, get a bikini wax?) We’ve got space heaters, blankets, and IcyHot to take care of that.

Let’s instead create another mental image – what if the Earth had to shave? Picture a gigantic forest. Not a scary Blair Witch style forest that can lower the IQ of attractive teenagers to a point where they end up dead at the hands of a barely adept serial killer. No, we’re going for a Bambiequse (pre-fire) style forest here. A place where skunks and rabbits are friends and butterflies can make a fawn stumble and fall simply by landing on its nose. Green, lush, tranquil. Picture that setting as the US’s beard. (Or leg/arm hair if you prefer. It doesn’t matter.)

Now, let’s take what we do to our legs or face every day, and explode it to the macro level. Try to imagine a measurement scale where one tree = one hair. When you get to that scale, think of how big of a razor you’d have to have to chop down Bambi’s home as quickly as we slice up our own tiny trees every day.

Without doing any kind of actual mathematics (I only hold a minor, so I don’t need to do real research), I would estimate that one blade of the razor would be 160 miles long and 10 miles wide. In today’s high tech society, you get mocked and judged if you use any less than three blades to ritualistically mutilate yourself after bathing, which means our forest felling Gillette is at least 4800 square miles. That’s about the size of Connecticut, for those who are keeping score.

So now, if we take the beard scenario, we are dragging a Constitution State sized blade across the country and along both coastlines from San Francisco, down around the goatee of Texas, to Washington D.C. skipping only Oklahoma and part of Arkansas (our imaginary US mouth would fall in this area). Every day. Can you imagine the havoc this would cause in our day-to-day lives? The collateral damage on the US highway system alone would be devastating, particularly since roads are already in a seemingly perpetual state of construction.

While a scenario like this might benefit evil corporations like Grandma’s Friendly Concrete, Paint Supplies, and Baked Goods, I really think that the global economy would be more than a little impacted by the constant rebuilding and subsequent destruction of the cities and roads across the United States. It seems naturally logical that we don’t destroy our country every day. Some might say it would spare us catcalls about affectations from France and New Zealand, but who cares about them anyway?

Let’s shrink back down a few levels again. Did you ever stop to think about the collateral damage you are doing to your skin every time you put your own little Constitution state against it? Neither had I, until today. I wonder how many microscopic empires I’ve crushed and tollbooths I’ve knocked over without a second thought.