I'm an old geezer

It's official. I am losing more hair--wait, it's not what you think. It was decades ago when I first started seeing large amounts of hair going down the shower drain every morning. It was painful to watch at first, but eventually, I came to accept its inevitability. This was especially difficult for a guy who once did not get a haircut for three and a half years, easily reaching behind my back and grasping my hair, which was half way down my back.

Now that my hair is very sparse, it seems that I am losing less of it to the drain, but something more sinister and distressing is occurring. Each morning, after showering, I stand in front of the basin and mirror, shaving, brushing, primping, spraying, etc. The other day, as I started to clean the area, I noticed that there were an assortment of hairs all about. That's not the distressing part.

To a third party, it might not have been given any notice at all, but as the owner of all those precious hairs, it meant a lot. What I witnessed were hairs of every possible origin. There were hairs from my head, perhaps a moustache hair, there may have been a nose hair or two, I saw at least one eye lash and I was fairly certain a thick and outlandishly long eye brow hair sat in the sink. It's anyone's guess whether a hair from an ear had joined the others just to make sure all sources were represented.

Maybe it shouldn't bother me so much. About six to eight months ago, I bought a battery-operated ear/nose hair trimmer and I've been very happy with it, relieving people of having to nervously look away after spotting the unsightly and embarrassing growth. Oh, I had tried my best to trim it with very small scissors, but it was always a job badly done and not without its dangers. On one occasion, a sudden sharp pain in my nose signalled I had cut something I shouldn't have. Half a tissue shoved up my nose became almost entirely soaked with blood before the stream subsided.

So, perhaps losing all this "extraneous" hair isn't such a bad thing--maybe soon, I won't have any hair left anywhere that I need to be concerned about removing...and risking my life in the process.

Caution: offensive content

Earlier this evening, I found another reason for my waning interest in watching hockey. Mind you, it's not a biggee, but just the same...

The Toronto Maple Leafs' Nik Antropov had just tied the game late in the third period against the Mighty Ducks (I still can't believe they adopted that name). The home crowd was going wild and the camera did a pan across the Leaf bench.

Many of the players were looking down as if there was something fascinating going on down there, and many others were looking in various directions, looking about as interested as if they were at a lawn bowling game. No offence to lawn bowlers who many I'm sure can make the Maple Leaf team.

Getting back to the camera pan, it stayed long enough on one player for the presumably millions of faithful Canadian hockey fans to witness the "horking up" of a "loogie" just shy of the size of a regulation golf ball, and its propulsion halfway across the ice surface, quite possibly landing on centre ice. If it were black, it might have instigated an invalid faceoff. However, the best was yet to come. One player, who will remain nameless, only because I was less interested in him, than he was that the camera was on him, had an index finger lodged up his nose, seemingly to the third knuckle, where it remained until it was out of camera range.

I think the ending of Taxi Driver is less offensive...maybe because it is reminiscent of old-time hockey. ;)