Ultra-Plus-Super-Mach-Power

There are many more, pricey, more important little items which one uses regularly that would be awful to lose.  It would be extremely frustrating to regularly lose a smart phone.  It happens.  Alcohol certainly increases the likelihood that it might.  But I haven’t lost a phone or a laptop in years.  Searching for wood to knock and deciding upon the heel of my boot, I continue to note that I have never lost a passport.  I’ve forgotten one at home before but so far I’ve never simply left it on the shelf of a urinal somewhere.

Razors though, are different.  I seem to lose a razor every other month.  Were these to be disposable Bic razors, bought in a bag of six or eight, who’d care?  But I’m not shaving my legs.  I’m going at the hearty rug on my face.  To do this I have, for most of my adult life, bought the latest Gillette razor for men.

Gillette markets to me and even though I don’t care, I am reluctantly brought along as one perfectly reasonable razor for ten dollars is replaced by something with a sturdier stem, fresh new colors, the capacity to vibrate, if I load it up with the accompanying battery.  Each of these ever more futuristic razor stems and packs of blades costs significantly more than the one before it.  Each one introduces the significant new risk that the twenty-six-dollar pack of blades you just procured will not fit on to your fancy new stem.   And within four to six weeks of buying my new ultra-plus-super-mach-power-blade, I lose it.

I shave in the shower.  Maybe that’s the problem.  When I’m on the road I bring them into the shower, scrape my face and lay the stem down somewhere near the soap.  And when it’s time to leave a friend’s or check out of a hotel, it won’t be long before I’ve found I left it there with the soap and empty shampoo and conditioner tubes.  Each time I’m furious with myself.

I left my razor in Japan last week.  I thought I was slick when I took the free hotel one as a backup.  Before I could scrape a hair, I’d broke this purposefully cheap blade, trying to remove the cap.   So I shower and I ignore my two-day-growth.  Shower’s certainly faster this way. 

For some reason I think of Mark Twain who had some memorable passages in “The Innocents Abroad” about how painful it was to lay down one’s neck to a barber with a straight blade in another land, far from home.  I am glad to have triple super-mach-power-blade.  Electric razors leave my face feeling like naugahyde.   I like a smooth scrape.  But how did Gillette develop such a commanding monopoly on this rather protean device?  Maybe the next-gen will blue tooth to my phone and warn me when I’m about to abandon it.  That I might pay for.

Wednesday, 05_03_17