The boy is taking a nap and I’ve unofficially determined that Creating Fiction is Not Happening Today.  I just, and by “just” I mean five minutes ago, told my wife that I was going to go lie down in the bedroom for a while.  We’ve got a date night tonight– we’re going to have dinner and then go see Godzilla, which is awesome, because a) Godzilla and b) it’ll give me two hours in which I probably won’t be obsessively monitoring book sales on Amazon like an asshole.

Anyway, yeah.  Five minutes.  Where am I?  Here, in the office, typing nonsense on a screen instead of reading and catching a catnap like a sensible person.  It may be time to abandon the novel I’m reading; anytime it takes me a week to get fifty pages into something it may be a sign that I’m not interested.  But I have friends who love the series, so… yeah.

I have developed a fascination over the last few days with safety razors.  This is not entirely a new phenomenon; it’s happened before, and I’ve managed to fight it off each time, but I don’t recall it striking me with the intensity that it has this time.  I can’t allow myself to become someone who shaves with a non-cartridge razor.  I am too clumsy to be waving sharp things around my face and I also have evolved my morning routine for maximum efficiency and speed, and taking fifteen minutes to carefully lather and shave and then clean everything up (without slicing my face to ribbons, because have I mentioned you can slice your face to ribbons with these things if you fuck up with them?) just doesn’t sound like something I’m really capable of doing.  Plus?  Expensive.  It turns out that this has become an impressively complicated niche market, and the tools that the big boys say are necessary for a genuine safety razor shave run pricey at first.  Of course, once you get set up you’re spending $.10 on razors for the rest of your life, so you catch up quick on the ridiculous price of cartridge razors, but then you cut your throat open and die when someone drops something heavy near you and startles you while you’re shaving.

(Also, my god, the complexity: what kind of razor?  How long should the handle be?  Did you know that razors are rated by “aggressiveness”?  Soap or cream, and don’t you dare use shaving cream out of a can like a philistine.  There are three thousand kinds of blades, some of which are considered far too sharp to be used by newbies.  Should your brush be made of boar hair or badger?  (Yes, boar and badger are the choices.)  If badger, which of the four separate grades of badger hair would you like/can you afford?  You know that your choice of boar or badger should probably correlate with the shaving soap/shaving cream dilemma, right?  Aftershave?  How much glycerine should be in your aftershave?  Will you be buying a stand for your razor and your brush, or just leaving them on the countertop like a loser so that your son can grab them and circumcise himself?  And are you prepared for just how ridiculously expensive stands can be?  Would you like a referral to Pinterest, where they show you how to make one from a wire coat hanger?  Yours won’t look like that, though.)

Here’s how I shave: in the shower, with water.  The thought of shaving my face with a blade is scary enough; how the shit am I gonna handle shaving my scalp?  With magic, apparently, or just by continuing to buy cartridges until I’m good enough to try the double-edge on my head.  Ever cut your scalp while shaving, by the way?  It bleeds like a motherfucker.

Oh, and I’ve determined to a fair degree of certainty that there are no stores anywhere anymore where I can actually buy any of this shit, so if I’m getting anything, I have to order it from Amazon sight unseen– which, man, is just my favorite thing– and then sit through a week of buyer’s remorse while I wait for everything to show up.

Then I can cut my face off.  Whee!