Man, I’m still working on this super long PTSD related post. It’s taking forever! If I don’t finish it by next week, I’ll probably just start pushing it out in smaller parts as part of series. In the meantime, here’s a old post I wrote more than 5 years ago for another site. I think it’s aged alright, so what the hell, enjoy:
If you pay any attention to the internets, you’ve probably noticed some ads for cheap razors. A few years back, my facebook feed plugged a dollar shave club ad, and I was intrigued. I had spent the last year drastically cutting down my expenses by closely examining all of my decisions and determining where I could either stop spending money or figure out a better way to get something done for less. This process helped me pay off the remaining balance (about $80K) on my mortgage in just under a year, and live on less than 25% of what I make. The dollar shave club ad really caught my eye; while I was excited about a new prospect at work, I knew it meant my expenses would go up in the razor category.
At the time, I had been working as a plainclothes detective for a few years and regularly did varying degrees of undercover work. This mostly meant surveillance, but occasionally I bought drugs and picked up hookers. Good fun; after all, variety is the turmeric of life. The best part about the detective gig was the relaxed dress and grooming standard. Or, better put, my Glorious Beard.
My beard was basically a separate entity to itself. It was a graceful being that bestowed great tidings to all. Birds would have loved to build a nest in it, a la Peter Griffin style. It performed its function well too. I think the best confirmation I got about my undercover effectiveness came from a homeless dude when I was working some surveillance. The city had given my unit yet another drug complaint to work; multiple residents in this one block had called saying that a heroin dealer was using a specific corner to pedal his stuff. This was correlated with a bunch of opiate overdoses in the area, so the bosses wanted us to make grabbing the dealer a priority. The area was in between a couple of high rises and densely packed residential units, in a less-than-nice side of town. Parking was at a premium, so watching from my car wasn’t going to happen, and there was a months-long backlog to get a static camera put up. This left us with trying to watch the corner while on foot.
I put on my best crappy clothes, teased out my beautiful beard, and parked my butt on a stoop in front of an abandoned building with a good view of the corner in question. I didn’t see much, but after a few hours of lazing about, a nice gentleman approached and engaged me in some light conversation. This fellow was wearing a knit cap lined with aluminum foil, pushed a shopping cart overflowing with empty cat food tins, and smelled of an interesting mix of pungent aromas. Using my cunning detective skills, I quickly deduced that this guy was either deeper undercover than me or, possibly less a home.
Knowing that dealers occasionally paid off the homeless to do look out work for them, I was keen to maintain my story that I too was without permanent shelter, and we chatted for some time. I spun some BS about how I had just hopped a bus into town and was new to the city. After some truly enlightening discussion, my new friend filled me in on the locations of nearby shelters, how to work them, and then continued his hunt for more magic cat circles. I beamed on the inside; a genuine homeless dude believed I was equally downtrodden. My faithful beard had worked.
Alas, like all things, my beard was not destined to last. I was offered the chance to help start a new unit of the type I thought our department desperately needed. The only downside was I would no longer need to do any undercover work-I’d have to shave my beard.
Besides lamenting the tragedy of losing such a magnificent furry friend, I was not looking forward to shaving regularly. Shaving had always irritated my face and, even worse, was pretty expensive. Pre-beard, I had been using the ubiquitous Mach 3 and easily went through a cartridge a week. This was costing me like 12 bucks a month! With my newfound FIRE/mustachian outlook, I was seriously dreading this, thus the intriguing appeal of the dollar shave club ad from the bookface.
Dollar shave club seemed like a good deal. I could get 5 cheap twin blade cartridges for a buck a month. I’d tried cheap razors before, but they killed my face. The club did offer to sell me 4 bladed cartridges comparable to my trusty mach 3 for 6 dollars a month. This was better than what I was paying, but I was a bit put off by the dubious bait and switch. Luckily, when I wasn’t at work, I was slaving away at grad school. If I picked up one thing from that lovely experience, it was to research the crap out of everything. This ethos plunged me into the abyss of the shaving community.
I gobbled up terabytes of data relating to double edged razors, straight razors, face butter and how the military-industrial-Gillette complex had duped us into spending way too much money on plastic razors that didn’t shave near as good as their predecessors. After a few weeks of reading, and rounds of cost-benefit analyses, I dropped over seventy bucks on a German Merkur Progress and a variety pack of razor blades. My research suggested that this razor would survive multiple stargate level Armageddon’s, and that I should stick with plain ol’ generic shaving foam to ease irritation (the ripoff barbasol stuff).
After a few youtube videos, I had the technique down pat, and currently cut myself as often as I used to with my old Mach 3. The shave is just as good and takes the same amount of time, but my face rarely gets irritated like it used to. I settled on Astras as my blade of choice. They cost me 10.fitty for a pack of 100, and I go through less than a blade a week. This method costs me less than 12 cents a month!I made my money back in about 13 months when compared to the midrange dollar shave club option.
In retrospect, I overspent on the Merkur Progress, as I opted for the pricy adjustable model. I sometimes have to shave every day, then occasionally I’ll go a week or two without shaving; I thought it’d be helpful to be able to change how close of shave I’d get depending on how much stubble I have. This turned out to be a non-issue, as I keep the thing set to the same level no matter what. Instead of getting the Progress, I probably should have gotten a non adjustable version for half as much. The Progress does seem pretty bulletproof though. I drop it regularly, and it looks like the same shiny new razor I bought three years ago.
I did learn something about myself while watching all the videos on shave technique and reading pages of stuff on the art of shaving: I really don’t care about shaving. It’s cool that some guys love to nerd out about this, but I just want to get the hair of my face with minimum drama and moneys spent, and only because my employer requires it. Given the choice, I’d be at beard thirty every day. Oh well, someday. With the financial independence plan on track, the end is in sight.
So yeah, questioning purchases, then researching the crap out of alternatives works. The bigger thing this whole experience did for me is subtly shift my thinking. I’d been spending a crapload of money on shitty razors for years, just because that’s the way everyone else did it. I didn’t even comprehend the possibility of an alternative. This realization got the gears turning. What else in my life followed this pattern? What else was I ignorantly doing that was ridiculously illogical? Not just in regard to wasting money-but in all other aspects of life as well. This threw me further down the rabbit hole, one that I’ve been enthusiastically plummeting down since.
There you have it; a blast from the past. A few updates regarding the above: The Merkur Progress is still going strong, and I’ve stuck with the Astra blades as well. Also, in keeping with hipster fashion, my department recently started allowing us to have close cropped beards. This has kept my face nice and toasty in the winter months, and I’m looking forward to letting my beard encroach upon ZZ top territory once I FIRE here in the next month or so. Progress on all fronts! (see what I did there?)
