LIFE: It's all downhill from here

LIFE: It's all downhill from here

I got out of the shower yesterday and looked in the mirror, and couldn't deny it any longer: I am losing my hair.

Well, as my wife will attest, I've been whining about the possibility of this for at least a year, as my widow's peak seemed to migrate ever-so-slightly northward and the tiny spot on the back of my head didn't seem quite so tiny. But with my hair wet and slicked back, there was no getting around it – them follicles are getting up and going. My forehead is becoming my whole head. Denial turned into acceptance.

*Sigh*. There are worse fates, to be sure, than mere baldness, and I guess I'm lucky that I had nearly 35 years of good hair days. I may not be the handsomest mug on the block, but one thing I always thought was that I had decent hair. I could grow it long or short, and besides being kind of wispy, it looked good. I admit I used hair spray far more than a proudly heterosexual man should, though. But for the last month or so, after realizing my long hair was accentuating the high hairline more than it was not, I've been wearing my hair real short. Why not? It's almost summer.

I don't think I'll be doing the ol' "shaved head" route any time – unfortunately, I have a very lumpy and bumpy cranium, topped off with a wonderful several inch-long scar running right down the middle of my head. That came from a case of the rare disorder craniostenosis when I was a kid – basically, I was born without a soft spot, and had to have one surgically added when I was about 8 months old. Fun fact – if you give me a CAT scan, I've got little bits of "shrapnel" throughout my skull left over from that surgery. Looks like I had a major car wreck. But, if it wasn't done, I'd have a skull that looked kind of like an eggplant and might also be real dumb or dead.

See? That's surely worse than baldness. I do hope I don't get to the point where that very prominent scar is obvious to everyone – I've worn my hair long enough to hide it for years – but I guess if I do get to that point I can come up with a cool story about a war wound, gripping action and death-defying adventure that left me hideously scarred yet oddly masculine, like Clint Eastwood at his peak. Anyway, at this point, I'm still "thinning" hair, like most men end up doing, and hopefully can wring a decade or so out of comb-overs and growing my bangs out. Besides, look how cool Picard looks! There's hope!