So I am riding my motorcycle the other day and I look in a side mirror to check for traffic. I see my face in the mirror and am disappointed that my mustache appears so....grayish..."Damn I look old," I say. I remember being in a drug store one time and seeing a product for men that is a hair coloring for mustache and beards.
I go get a box of this stuff 'light brown' to match my natural color. It seems that the obligations in my life, especially to the people I care for and love, not to mention the animals, keeps me in constant state of, short on time, too much to do...In the case of buying hair dye it's no exception. I ran into the drug store on my way to work and grabbed it. I took about 30 seconds reading the instructions while driving the rest of the way to work.
Speaking of work, I am a meat cutter in a market, used to be called a butcher in the day when markets bought half beef sides and cut the poor thing up into all kinds of product. Now days shops get cases of precut chunks of beef and the meat cutters make steak, roast,and all the rest.
My schedule the day of the mustache coloring incident was 1:30pm to 10pm, so by the time I get home I am tired, hungry, and really just want to go to sleep.
However, coupled with the desire to call it a day is the anxiety of looking at that gray mustache in the mirror the next morning, so I decide to do the color job quickly and have a surprise for my self when I wake up. I hurry mixing up the stuff and using a provided brush comb the goo into my mustache and even my eyebrows to get a balance sort of to speak. I go to bed and crash after watching about fifteen minutes of a movie.
Next day I wake up and remember to check my new look. I walk into the bathroom and take a look. Groucho Marks is staring back at me in the mirror! This is the darkest light brown in history! I grab the instructions and for the first time really read them, at least the English part, cuz as usual, it's got fifteen other languages included. I get as far as "leave the coloring on for a maximum of five minutes" and choke on my stupidity. Reading further, I find one is too use shampoo to wash out the color and give it a nice 'natural' look. Shit. I start scrubbing the mustache and eyebrows with mega doses of shampoo for about five minutes at a time and washing it out then checking the result. After fifteen minutes of pure panic I begin to see (or possibly imagine) an improvement. Then I notice the liquid laundry detergent sitting near by and think, "hey, that stuff has bleach in it, right?, yea, baby"!...I am pouring the stuff straight on the wash cloth now and scrubbing the hell out of the effected areas...I go to wash the stuff out with the hot water and get the shock of my life. Ever go to the beach and get a major sunburn then make the mistake of a hot shower after? A thousand pins and needles, right? My skin around my mouth got so irritated it started bleeding. I went to work that day and every body was double taking me, then saying it looks....nice.
Maybe the lesson learned here is to slow down, or perhaps it's meant to teach me to accept my self as I am, or maybe it's none of those and I am just analyzing too much...One thing it did do that is no denying, it gave a few people in my life something to laugh about, and that makes it all worth while.
