Shaving Cream, Be Nice And Clean, Shave Every Day And You'll Always Look Keen
Here is today’s grand straight razor shaving adventure in three photos:
First, here is me unshaven. And uncombed. And un-everything, Jesus Christ, I’m not a movie star I BRUSHED MY TEETH FOR YOU BEFORE THIS WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT
Here is me having shaved with the grain of my skin, i.e., “Down slope on the hairs.” I have pretty much mastered this. The reason I look terrified is because I am about to shave against the grain, which is to say, “Uphill,” which is to say “I’mma about to cut my face all up again.”
…but it went okay! A little razor burn, to be sure. This is the first shave I’ve had since I started shaving with the straight razor that’s actually comparable to the disposable – something no one tells you about. Sure, you will have a super-close shave, eventually, but first you’re going to have a three o’clock shadow immediately after shaving. Or, you know, a face full of gashes. Or both.
There’s really three tricks, I’ve learned, about straight razor shaving: first, you have to have a good cream. The shaving soap I had wasn’t working, even with the judicious application of hot water to my face beforehand; if you’re an amateur, like I am, you need a thick layer of goop to blunt the deadly edge in your trembling hands. A handful of tiny bubbles ain’t gonna cut it, Mr. Ho. Or, to be more accurate, it will cut it all too well.
The second trick is that you have to have a good grip. But like writing, while everyone’s full of advice and you should try everything out, it always comes down to what works for you. I have yet to find any manual that suggests the rather awkward grip I use, but once I discovered that’s what I was comfortable with, things got better.
And the third trick is that you have to understand skin. It is, as polymorphism put it, “a new intimacy with your own skin.” Straight razor shaving requires you to really pay attention to that fleshy cheek, that ridge over the jaw, that hollow on the left side of your throat. You’re learning how to interact with your body in a new way – which, as polymorphism also put it, is rather a wonder to discover after possessing a body for forty-three years.
Next up: Honing, in about a month. We’ll see how that goes.
The Object of Dread: Something Few People Talk About In Love
The trick to understanding love is that it is the easy part. Love flows freely, as we all long to be in love, and so given the slightest outlet love will come fizzing out of us like champagne from a bottle.
The problem is in this society, “love” gets confused with “like” – and anyone who’s ever loved a family member who irritates them with every single phone call and yet still rushes to the hospital in tears whenever something goes wrong, knows that love and like are as similar as apples and crankcase shafts.
Give someone a relationship full of love but no like, and it’ll be awash in petty arguments about mundane things – why do you watch that stupid FOX News, well, why do you listen to that insipid song, oh look we’re late for this movie again. It’s like living in a sniper pit, where you’re continually being shot at by irritations. But give someone a relationship with zero love, yet topped off with vast amounts of like, and it’ll function well enough. Won’t be as satisfying as a sweeping romance, but you’ll live in a house without killing each other, and you’ll pay the bills on the time, and not fight over what movie to watch, and enjoy each other’s company.
Love often renews, automatically, like a magazine subscription. It takes a lot to shake someone out of a good love.
Renewing like, however, takes an active effort. And when the like’s gone, as I have been arguing here, the relationship might as well be over. You won’t be happy in it. You can’t be happy. You’re with someone who’s constantly jabbing at your ribs with an umbrella, and though it may be an accidental jabbing, you’re still stuck with someone who’s lowering the quality of your existence.
And what no one tells you is that as each dollop of like evaporates, it leaves behind a thin layer of dread.
Like many things about relationships, dread is best recognized in retrospect. It’s that small “Oh, God, I have to…” when you think about being in your lover’s arms. It’s that reluctance to show up, lest s/he do That Thing again. It’s that twinge of reassurance you have to offer yourself that everything will be wonderful if that just doesn’t happen. It’s that weight on your heels as you go out the door, realizing that if you don’t go you’ll have to explain why and oh Lord let’s get it over with.
Learning to identify dread is a very valuable skill in a relationship, because most people are bad at it. We’re trained that if we’re in love, everything is wonderful, and so if there is dread, we try not to acknowledge that. We submerge it. We argue it away by saying that doubtlessly, we all have bad habits, and this is just one soft spot among the many delightful things our partner brings to us, and aren’t we just as bad sometimes? We see it as a problem to be worked on, something we’ll get used to, like choking down vegetables until you learn to like the taste.
Yet dread is different than annoyance. Annoyance is when your partner does something, and you hate that, but you still want to be around them.
Dread is when you actively start to not want to see them. You often do, because if the relationship hasn’t tumbled head-first into the Chasm of Dread, there’s still a left to like, and this twinge of please no is drowned out by a chorus of yes please.
Yet the relationship’s in trouble when, consciously or no, you hesitate and do that calculation: should I?
And dread creeps up slowly, because usually you’re floating on a big sunny sea of New Relationship Energy where everything is wonderful, and you’re loathe to call it dread because society says that you can’t be in love forever with someone you dread, and by God society is pretty spot-on on this one. You don’t want to think it’s over this soon. So you try not to think about it and just blindly hope that it’ll get better.
Little bits of dread can sometimes be snipped away, but that gets awkward, because you have to have to say, “Something you’re doing is so big a turn-off that it’s making me not want to show up.” There’s a careful alchemy here, which varies from person to person – step too lightly and they’ll go, “Oh, you’re not really bothered by me subjecting you to Dutch Oven farts when we’re in bed!” Step too harsh, and they’ll react as though you’ve just told them a part of them is vile and repellent – which, you know, it actually is to you if you’re talking about it honestly, but you’re often not asking them to stop being that, just to not be that around you.
Which is tricksy. Dread’s often a sign that you’re fundamentally mismatched. Who wants to talk about that?
But dread is the death of relationships. You need to recognize when dread is creeping up, and look it boldly in the face to say, “Maybe this isn’t gonna work.”
Since you can, as noted, get by without love. If you have to, you can function as a unit for the kids or your career without like. But when you’re saturated in dread, well, the biggest danger is not a break-up. It’s that you’ll stay together, loathing so much of each other that it’s like living in a mosquito-filled tent and never being able to really swat, filled with all sorts of awful things you can’t bring yourself to say because you love them and don’t want to hurt their feelings and they don’t seem to have all of this dread, they’re filled with nothing but purest love, and how could you refuse that?
So you wait. Dreading. Flinching in anticipation of the next hammerfall, and it will fall. But not leaving, because hey, you’re in love, that should mean something. And there, trapped in a place where you have no affection left in your heart, you will find out just how bare, rocky, and discomfiting love – and only love – can be.
Also, Brilliance From The Crowd, By Which I Mean You
I’m brain-dead right now, since I was up until 3 a.m. talking with the vivacious Nayad, and then could not fall to sleep.
However, yesterday I posted a fear that the death of brick-and-mortar stores might cause increased pricing, and there have been some fascinating discussions on whether UPS deliveries would be cheaper overall. There’s some really interesting points, so I’ll just direct you to the comments.
A Kickstarter I Enjoy: GUD Magazine
We are all adrift in a sea of Kickstarters, but this one’s worthy. You may remember GUD Magazine, the fine (and bulky) magazine full of awesome stories, as I reviewed way back when. GUD has a nice vibe that I adore, nice character-driven stories that run the gamut in tone. And they were, eventually, kind enough to purchase my story “In The Garden of Rust and Salt,” which for an early post-Clarion story is still one of my strongest.
Now they have a Kickstarter for Issue #7, which has all kinds of good writers. The Kickstarter is already funded, because they are that good, but the real value is in the zine you’ll get, which I have every faith will be awesome. So if you like speculative fiction, check it out. Soon. (It’s over in 54 hours.)
My Strange Fear About Amazon's Dominance
Barnes and Noble’s quarterly results came out today, and they’re not good; sales down 10%, store-to-store comparisons down, Nook sales down. It looks like B&N is sliding the way of Borders…. though since they’re much better managed and essentially the only big dog left in the show, I think they’ll have more fight in ’em.
That said, I’m actually terrified of Amazon winning the book war. Or any war involving retail.
It’s not because I think Amazon is an evil company – well, okay, they are an evil company, but pretty much all companies are evil. As The Corporation accurately said, corporations are sociopaths, feral beasts designed to devour the competition and minimize costs at any price. There’s some human element of resistance flitting about within the soul of the Beast, but not much, and as a result I think cheering for Apple over Microsoft or Google is like having a favorite killer bear. They’re all going to turn on you, if they’re hungry.
No, I worry about the end of cheap gas.
Right now, Amazon’s high because shipping is pretty damn cheap. We can afford to have UPS drivers going from home to home, delivering shit right to your door… which is a colossal usage of energy, if you think about it. Before, you shipped books from a warehouse to a mostly-central location, but now the pattern is increasingly, “Let’s not deliver one large package to the shop in the middle of town, but hundreds of smaller packages to everyone in the town.”
And if prices rise sharply, then what happens? Suddenly, Amazon.com – or any other delivery service – will become unaffordable. (Sure, that $25 free shipping is genius, but if it suddenly cost you $10 for every package, would you bother?) And if that happens, and Amazon has consumed the other competition, there won’t be the infrastructure to buy locally. All the bookshops will be gone, the Best Buys and Circuit Cities demolished, and what the fuck will we do then?
Oh, I know, you bold believers in capitalism think, “Oh, we’ll just flex back! No problem! Business is almighty, it’ll adapt!” But that’s a lot of retail expertise lost, and a lot of poor and rural neighborhoods underserved, and I think we’ll find that when delivering door-to-door becomes unfeasible, a lot of people will be left without the ability to get stuff. Or, more accurately, they’ll be able to get stuff at ridiculously high delivery prices that will cripple their budget.
As a result, I’m always a little against Amazon. Which is silly, on some levels; I work for an internet retailer, and it’s like rooting against my own job security. But still. I want the brick and mortars around, because in the back of my mind the collapse is coming, the end of oil is coming, the zombies are coming, and dammit we should be prepared.