I Buzzed My Hair And Instantly Regretted It

There have been many changes in our daily lives caused by the pandemic. On the absolute least essential side, people have not been able to get their hair done. Of all the things to complain about, this one is rather ridiculous. The world was shut down so nobody was seeing you, and how obsessed with your fake ass look do you have to be to care about it that much when nobody sees you? I mean, I care about my body even though I never have a reason to take my shirt off, and, oh, I guess that’s why people were also lamenting not having a gym even though you don’t need a gym unless you are a professional athlete.

But back to the hair. My hair was getting long, and it was getting hot in Florida. This was no longer an appearance an issue; this was a comfort issue. Unfortunately, my wife was not a fan of me having short hair so it took some convincing before I finally got approval. You can call me names and talk about how my wife wears the pants in the family (that might be true), but this is much more a situation of I don’t care about my hair, and she does; plus she is the one stuck looking at me. So her approval set off me on a search of my garage for my old clippers. Those might be in there somewhere, but they might be thrown out when she said she would never let me buzz my head again. Either way, I ordered a new set on Amazon for $20. Since I was not very quick to come up with this brilliant plan, it took nearly three weeks to get to me, but short hair would be mine.

I was so excited when the package finally came. Once I put the little guy down for an afternoon nap, I got set up in the backyard so my old hair could spawn new mes all around Florida as it blew across the state. It felt great as I felt that buzzer and watched clumps of hair fall to the grass. I didn’t have a mirror, so I kept feeling around my head and got any spots that I may have missed. On my way inside, I caught my reflection in the window, and...it was not good. I keep my hair short, but I still realized that it was a whole lot longer than what I had just done with a 2 guard.

I came inside, and my wife gave me a three word reaction, “I hate it.” She elaborated that she hates it so much, and she didn’t want to look at me, but she still loved me. Not an ideal reaction, but not totally surprising.

When I was finally able to look in a mirror, it was worse than I thought. WAS I BALDING? There was a spot near the front middle of my head that looked like the hair was less dense than around it. I was terrified. I felt it, and it felt like the other spots, but I wasn’t sure if it was too traumatic for me to accept, and I was just convincing myself of a lie.

As I looked closer, I realized that there was plenty of hair all over my head, but there was such a concentration of gray hair that it made it look thinner than the brown hair around it. I knew that I was getting more and more grays sprouting up, but this really hammered the point home. I’m not gonna lie, it bruised the ego a tad.

My wife asked me if I was going to start coloring my hair. All I can say is not yet. I’m not saying I will never do it, but I will say it seems unlikely. It just seems like a ton of upkeep, and I don’t think I’m that dedicated to hair color. Right now, my plan is to gray naturally and eventually turn into a silver fox.

But I really need to grow my hair out again.

My YouTube Wormholes of COVID-19

COVID-19 has caused quite a few changes in everyday life. The grocery store is now the most exciting part of my week as it is the only reason to get far from my home. Overall, it's been great though. At first, my wife and I didn't have to go to work because we could work remotely. Then, I didn't have to go to work because I got furloughed, which, although not ideal, means that I get to fully focus on raising a one-year-old which is awesome (and exhausting). But there is some extra time for media consumption during his naps, and there is a lack of interesting things on television with the world rightfully shutting down. This has led me down some weird roads, primarily on YouTube.

It started innocently enough. I started with pro wrestling videos. Free matches and events. It started with matches from Defy that I had seen in person like Shane Strickland (now Isaiah Scott) vs. Matt Riddle (now Matt Riddle), and that led to intergender matches like Kylie Rae vs. Orange Cassidy which led me to AR Fox vs. Kimber Lee, and then things progressed to full Evolve shows. And pro wrestling led me down other paths.

YouTube kept finding my interests, so I had to watch the Iowa/Penn State wrestling dual...from 1994. I mean, it's not like I'm going to pass up a match with Lincoln McIlravy in it. Then I found out that there were about two wrestling matches every year in the 90s that some guy lifted off of Iowa Public Television and put on the web, so I watched 'em all. I was still trying to fill the hole in my heart from not having an NCAA Championships this year. It didn't quite fill the void, so I went to the hard stuff, international freestyle wrestling. Sure, I could enjoy the recent stuff from the last 15 years, but then I started going back to the 60s where I could barely follow what was going on since freestyle wrestling has had so many damn rule changes. Kurt Angle matches were a tad disappointing, but when I stumbled on Randy Lewis beating John Smith, I thought I hit the holy grail. Then I saw Lee Fullhart beat Cael Sanderson, and oh man, that was the sweetest spot. But not everything was perfect in the world of freestyle wrestling. When I made it to the mid-2000s and started seeing ball draws, I was nearly shaking with anger. I know that you probably have no idea what that means, but whatever you're imagining, I promise it is ten times dumber.

I channeled that anger in the most logical way. Early MMA events. UFC 2, oh hell yeah. World Extreme Fighting 9 including Dan Severn, Matt Hughes, Rich Franklin, and Jens Pulver, oh my god yes! After that, it was Pride, oh man, so much Pride. They're all great. Wanderlei Silva, Kazushi Sakuraba, Mark Kerr, and the crowds are truly amazing. They love the Japanese guys most, but if you go out and destroy the world in your fights, they love you almost as much.

But violence can only take you so far, so who knows what my next adventure will be...oh shit, they've got old Slamball games. My week is officially planned. Thanks, quarantine.

Get Swoll During Social Distancing

Covid-19 has really brought out the extremes in people. You have people showing extreme caution and others being extremely stupid and helping the spread of the disease. You have people who are losing their minds while working from home and others who who are thriving in that situation. And you have people who are just laying around eating crappy food and getting fat because there’s nothing to do, and you have the people who are more active than ever, again, because there’s nothing to do.

I’m trying to increase my activity as I had recently found myself in a lull when it came to fitness. I haven’t been to a gym in years as I mostly do body weight exercises and just stay active any way I can, with help from the dog and toddler. But as my baby boy gets older, he’s probably going to tell other kids that his Dad can beat up their Dad, so I decided I needed to be as strong as possible to give the other Dad just enough doubt to not get into the fight before he ends up kicking my ass.

Initially, all I wanted was a pullup bar because pullups are manly and awesome. But decent pullup bars were like $50-$80, and that seemed a tad excessive to me. But then, something caught my eyes. Yes, it was about twice as expensive, but there was at least five times the exercises I could do with it. I had to have one (as long as my wife approved).

Luckily she did, and I had myself a POWER TOWER.

I also added some hand grips so the whole thing cost me about $125. I have a garage that I can throw the thing into, but if you don’t, it could easily take the spot of a living room chair, and you could have the meat(head) seat for anyone who wanted to blast through some reps while blasting through Tiger King episodes.

There are no weights with it, but you have all the weight you need with the magic of the human body. It’s got a pullup bar, pushup handles, dip handles, and you can do leg raises to crunch those abs. I added the handles so I could do inverted rows. There’s nothing special for shoulders, but all you need is a wall and you can do some handstand pushups. Just like that, your entire upper body can be shredded.

Everybody knows that you can’t make a muscle omelette without scrambling some legs. Legs ain’t complicated though. This machine has a spot for calf raises, and just do squats and lunges and your legs will be fine. This stuff isn’t complicated.

Slightly more complicated is putting the thing together. I would consider myself a novice handyman. If I have instructions, I can get it done, and I can consult my good friends at Youtube.com if I run into any issues. I definitely ran into issues. I put the thing together fairly easily, and it advised to let the nuts be loose until you get everything in place. I did that and most were easy to then tighten, but for some reason, the nuts at the bottom wouldn’t tighten because the screw just kept turning with it. I then had to put the fully built Power Tower on it’s back so I could get to those screws. But then I realized that they put rounded screws down at the bottom and my wrench was not going to hold onto that consistently despite my super manly grip strength. So I brought in some vise-grip pliers to help me with the job, and that definitely did the trick. I figured I should probably build this thing correctly if I planned on being in compromising positions with my entire body weight depending on it.

As I have told anyone who will listen when they ask what the best exercise is, it’s the one you enjoy doing, because that’s the only exercise that you will actually stick with. Now that I have a power tower, I can mix it up just enough in body weight exercises that I’ll be entertained for the foreseeable future.

Although COvid is what led me to this training, once I get jacked, I’ll be ready for Xvid.
There’s just one small perfectly average-sized problem that not even a Power Tower can fix.