The Low Level Indignities of being a Bald Bespectacled Man in the Southern Summer

Getting older is full of indignities and humiliations, some of them life-changing and catastrophic, others more mundane.

When I was about twenty-four years old, for example, I began losing my hair. Being terribly vain, this mortified me so every night I would take an applicator and strategically apply Rogaine in a desperate bid to delay the inevitable. 

It made me feel like a narcissistic idiot. It also felt unmistakably like a science project that I would inevitably screw up. Hell, I couldn’t even handle a “Weird Al” Yankovic Chia Pet. How was I going to be able hold onto my own hair? 

At the time Rogaine didn’t restore hair. The best it could do was prevent or slow hair loss. Yet I kept on using it because I did not want to admit, to myself or the world at large, that I was a bald man in his mid-20s. 

Doppelganger

When I did my poorly rated, increasingly prestigious movie review panel show Movie Club with John Ridley in 2004 and 2005, I was still clinging to the illusion that I was not, in fact, bald but I wasn’t fooling anyone. 

I eventually reached a point where the only real option was to go bald with as much dignity as I could muster, to embrace baldness and everything that goes with it: age, wisdom, the respect and adoration of young people with instinctive deference for their bald elders.

It was not only the right decision from an aesthetic perspective: it was the right choice emotionally and psychologically as well. When I had my head shaved I was no longer living a lie. I was no longer trying to fool the world into thinking that I was younger, or more robust or hairier than I actually was. 

Peace of mind came with accepting my baldness. On a similar note I refused to get glasses as a kid even though I could see very poorly without them out of vanity and a paranoid if understandable conviction that kids would make fun of me if they saw me wearing glasses and girls would think I was a dork. 

Bear in mind, children made fun of me and girls thought I was a dork even without glasses, but I feared that they’d send me hurtling into a disturbing new stratosphere of geekdom. 

But when I broke down and got glasses my life improved immeasurably. I could actually see things clearly for the first time in my life! Granted, many of the things I saw were shitty because I had a fucked-up, traumatic childhood but I loved the clarity all the same. 

Now I am a forty five year husband and father who long ago accepted, even embraced the glasses and baldness lifestyle. It works pretty well for me. I like the way I look with glasses so much that when the dude who shot the photo for my state I.D told me to take them off for my photo I resisted initially and was deeply unhappy with the results. 

There are, however, embarrassments unique to folks with glasses and no hair in the South. Because of the shape of my head and my propensity for sweating it is not unusual for my sweat-coated glasses to slide off my face and onto the ground anywhere from five to ten times a day. 

Every day! Every single goddamn day of my life my sweat-soaked glasses will tumble gracelessly to the ground when I bend down to pick up one of my sons or get something from the refrigerator or basically do anything that involves bending down. 

It’s a low-level humiliation unique to the hairless, sweaty and bespectacled. It’s not the worst thing in the world, obviously, but it does humble me on pretty much an hourly basis by reminding me, yet again, that I am old and can’t see without corrective eyewear and lost my glorious mane of hair decades ago and also will probably be dead soon. 

Okay, so that last part is a little gloomy and melodramatic but it is humbling and getting a chain to keep my glasses attached to my face would be a fix that would only make the problem worse, I fear.

I’m less vain than I was as a boy but I still fear that wearing a chain to keep my glasses to keep my glasses on my head would catapult me to an Urkel/the entire cast of Revenge of the Nerds level of dorkiness. 

So my glasses will continue to tumble gracelessly to the ground, a perpetual reminder of the inexorable march of time and the innate fragility of the human condition. 

Missed out on the Kickstarter campaign for The Weird A-Coloring to Al/The Weird A-Coloring to Al-Colored In Edition? You’re in luck, because you can still pre-order the books, and get all manner of nifty exclusives, by pledging over at https://the-weird-a-coloring-to-al-coloring-colored-in-books.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are EIGHT so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

and of course you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

AND of course you can also pledge to this site and help keep the lights on at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace