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At a half-millimeter per day, the average beard takes three or four weeks to look like anything other than an EPA-designated disaster area. A beard must be about an inch in length before it progresses from a skin-destroying rasp to a soft carpet of fur. Few things hearken to a well-started morning like discovering that your face has grown into the weave of your pillow, or that three thousand infinitesimal holes have been punched into your waterbed mattress. Experiencing the discomfort of rubbing against the distal end of the short hairs is no joy. As the culture tank at the proximal end, I assure you the experience is not much more enjoyable on my side.

"I don't like your beard. Shave it off."

When your face is daily abraded by sharp metal and traumatized by alcohol-based disinfectants, it builds up a layer of toughened or at least resigned tissue that becomes inured to the daily jolt. After three or four weeks of abstinence, that skin has regained its soft, exquisitely sensitive native properties and the first shave is a memorable one. Like pulling the pin on a grenade and launching it at the enemy, that first depilation will explode into being every zit, wen, ulcer, pus volcano, pimple, abscess, boil, carbuncle, and eroded flesh pit known to man or extrapolatable from medical textbooks with color pictures kept locked in the Reserved Section of your local university library. You will cut yourself silly and bleed like a stuck pig. There is only one comment your significant other can make at a time like this:

"I changed my mind. I like you better with the beard,"

and can you regrow it by this evening because you are having dinner with the neighbors.

Male researchers have spent decades in our laboratories seeking vengeance for these whims born of flailing estrogen storms. Our revenge is embodied in a high speed circulating coiled steel spring that in every literal sense pulls hair right out by the roots, emplacing screaming agony into square feet of sensitive flesh covering matronly legs. Were this device to approach the bikini line it would seize upon it like some rabid wolverine, implaca

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