(More fun ways to frighten timid people)

Earlier this month, while I wasn’t looking, I got blindsided by another birthday. They’re relentless, these birthday things – I could swear I just had one last year.

Generally speaking, I’m a big fan of birthdays, especially the ‘milestone’ years. If you’re a guy, the milestone years are very cool. You know the list:

Year One: You’ve made it! You’re breathing, your parents have submitted your resume and references to several exclusive kindergartens, and you’re safe from any retroactive Roe v. Wade issues, unless you vote Republican.
Year Eighteen: You’re not old enough to have a beer, but you’re old enough to go point guns at brown people in some sandbox with a name like Absurdistan.
Year Thirty: You’re in a mortgage, but you’re out of testosterone.

But once you get past thirty or forty years of this, you find yourself celebrating more, well, obscure annual victories:

You’ve made it to the next prime number
You’ve made it another year without clipping cents-off ‘Depends’ coupons

Personally, I’ve tried to benchmark the last few, um, prime numbers a bit differently. As each birthday rolls around, I try to deliver on a couple of personal goals:

Do something I’ve never done before
Avoid seeing my name in the obituary column

Here’s the problem: the list of things I’ve never done before is shrinking. The legal list, anyway. And at my age, Illegal things no longer hold any allure. Other than one marginally actionable incident involving a staggeringly gorgeous bartender from Illinois and a bitter ferret from Charleston, I’ve studiously avoided activities that might result in me having to say things like “Yes, Your Honor” and end up wearing loose-fitting state-issue clothing.

So this year, I shaved my head.

Ever done that? It was a lot more difficult than I expected. I mean, we’re talking about my brain’s veneer versus my cheesy twelve-pack of chin scrapers. I consider myself very lucky to have gotten out alive, with only two new divots in my head.

It wasn’t just that there was more real estate to survey, more lawn to mow. It was like invading a foreign country, with no maps and minimal ordnance. I mean, think about it: you’re attacking your own skull with a razor you bought at the grocers for 79 cents. Plus, this isn’t at all like shaving your face, or your chin, or a coastal ferret, something you’ve done maybe 10,000 times before (not the ferret).

This was a trip to rural head. This was crania incognita.

And because I’m approximately as coordinated as a damaged mollusk, I can only use one hand to do anything, which usually doesn’t slow me down very much, unless I need to clap. But when I was trying to shave my head, even my ‘good’ hand seemed to have a mind of its own. I spent long minutes staring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, trying to communicate non-lethal razoring vectors to my wrist, so that I wouldn’t gash my brain wagon and suddenly become what is known as ‘breaking news.’

But since you’re reading this, you probably figured out that I survived the deforestation. It took forever, but I survived. After the scrape-tivities, I dried my dome and dabbed at the divots. I threw out the razor and threw on a hospital scrub shirt. And lastly, I took a few moments for review and introspection.

My first surprise in the mirror, once the mission had been completed, was that I looked like an escaped mental patient from some particularly sadistic future. There’s just something about a freshly-shaved, mildly-pale-blue-tinted top-skull that screams “Nurse Ratched! I want my cigarettes!“

Looking back, maybe the scrub shirt was a bad idea.

And my de-pelted skull wasn’t at all what I’d expected. I’d always assumed that, under the hair, I’d been carting around a coy but structurally perfect geodesic masterpiece, sure to bring an envious tear to the eye of Buckminster Fuller and any other bowling ball manufacturers.

But no. My unveiled over-veined head bulges in the back, like that short-tempered she-beast from the Alien movies; you know, that bucket-headed drool-monster with the ‘live and let live’ personality of the Queen of Hearts, the territorial management style of Leona Helmsley, and the deluxe dental plan of Joe Biden.

So be warned, all you potential head denuders. Your bush-hogged bean is not perfect. But that only makes sense, considering the body your head is sitting on.

It gets worse. Wait till that first time you expose your Carlsbad Cavernized pale pate to the sun at the beach. You can practically hear old Sol snickering, “Oh, the things I’m gonna do to that head!” And then, après skullburn, try and find a nice unscented anti-glare SPF 8000 ointment.

On the other hand…

The Upside of Cranial Strip-Mining

If you’re single and still shopping, being hairless attracts a whole new dating niche: the free-lance phrenologist.
You can rent out the additional skull space for billboard signage. Keep it tasteful — polite society tends to frown on three-dimensional cows with bad spelling skills hawing heterosexual chicken biscuits.
If a passing bird decides to, well, jettison anything, at least it won’t land in your hair.

It’d be okay if you could harvest your head and then spend a few prime numbered solar cycles coming to terms with your new neck marble. But eventually you have to leave the house, because although, as a country, we’ve figured out how to land on the moon, we still can’t get anybody to deliver Mexican food.

And you newly nude-capped guys should know this: bald evokes commentary. When faced with the suddenly shorn, the general public refuses to go quietly into that bald night. Co-workers will bombard you with their sudden repertoire of ‘baldy’ jokes, that they consider hilarious to the point of Pulitzer nomination.

No worries. Should the jokes get out of hand, just send in the ferret.

Theoretically, though, there is social potential in being close-cropped. I’m told that many women consider a bald head to be virile. That’s certainly true in my case, assuming ‘virile’ means ‘appears to have lost a fight with a multi-bladed farm implement.’

But, like most things, it’ll all work out. If things get desperate, I can always phone the coast, call in a favor, and staple on a ferret toupee.

After all, it seems to work for Joe Biden.