What To Do With Your Back Hair

We’ve all got it. Perhaps I should rephrase that. We all want it pretty bad. Okay, maybe that isn’t quite right either. Back hair, the more virile types are blessed with it. But, because Western society frowns upon flocculent manliness, I’m inclined to believe many of you, perhaps even on this very day, went behind a closed door to trim back your wonderfully fleecy backside. And I suppose that’s fine, to shamefully shear off any trace of your proud evolution. But other options exist, and I’d like to lay them on the table. Now and for all of eternity, let us know what is good and true when it comes to your amazing and beautiful, sexy as anything in the world, back hair.

Let It Grow. Do you remember when you were a little boy? Of course you do. This when you saw your father walking from the laundry room through the kitchen to the shower wearing his white briefs. But those whitey-tighties, they have not been named correctly. Their years of use have made them a fine gossamer. Though somehow they are still able to contain the most precious of jewels, the ones belonging to your paterfamilias.

Now you remember, you and your sisters laugh as your mother tells your father to “get some clothes on.” Then as he walks away, you can’t help but notice the luxuriant tufts of black fur sprouting along the lengths of his back, and up onto his shoulders. As the head of a pride, this kingly hair shows dominance.

Now, as an adult, can you imagine as a boy seeing your father without such a crucial mane? If he’d done such a thing as shave it off, Freudian cracks would’ve verily arisen between you and your mother. So then, be a man, let your back hair grow long.

Use a Nose Trimmer. But if you must cut it off, if you must rid yourself of any demarcations of experience and wisdom, use a nose trimmer. But know it will be like this. Much like cutting down a Redwood and seeing its rings at the remaining stump, see what remains, see the stubbly sad residue of an area once so proud. Using your trimmer for things like your nose, cutting away that which shoots like wild bamboo out of your nostrils, that’s fine. It’s even normal to use the same trimmer to scale back the bristly hair which pings out of your ears. But to use such a tool on your back, on the part of your body which a woman or a man wants to feel…well, I say, you’re only taking away the pleasures they might have enjoyed. And now with your glabrous self, those delights will remain forever unknown.

Wax It All Off. Do you remember another time in your life? The time as a young man growing into a slightly older version of a young man? This is the time in which you first worried about back hair. In college, you never thought you’d have it like your father. Of course you never thought you’d go bald, but since both things have started you think perhaps Satan loves you more than God ever did. In fact, you’re quite sure God is dead entirely. Nietzsche, Bergman, Hitchens, they’re all right, and the evidence of their summation is manifested in the hairs you see on your pillow each morning, and by how they seem to be crawling from that pillow and into your back. Science would tell you that’s not actually happening, but you’re not convinced.

So what do you to stem the rising tide? You do what any other young man living at home in his late teens would do, you ask your mom for help. But first you go and buy the necessary strips of wax, the ones from a pink box meant for a woman’s pubic, then you come back and get in front of the mirror as your mom takes the strips of wax and affixes them to different areas of your back. And though you may be bleeding now, all back hair will be taken away. At least for a week or so.

In Your Old Age. How is it you still employ such sophomoric routines? You still believe having back hair is like having a horn coming out of the side of your head? You even consider shaving it with a razor? But you don’t do that, do you. Because you’re a bit older now, you have the money to go out and get it waxed professionally. Maybe you even have the means to have it burned off with a laser. Though even when you go in to do that, you remember back to your father walking across the kitchen, the light shining on him like in a Hollywood movie. And you remember back to you mom applying strips of glue to your back and ripping them off with your hair at the root and so you know, and without a doubt, having hair on your back is not a sign of weakness, but of great strength. So you stride out of the doctor’s office without a shirt, showing off your back, and you don’t mind that which trails behind you.

This is your back hair, and it always will be.