the reverse comb-over

After a week or so of delay and diversion, I finally got around to shaving my head. It is a task I very nearly dread, but it is a necessity if I am to maintain any pretense of grooming whatsoever. My baldness, like my lying, is of a distinctly male-pattern kind. A large purely bald spot on the back of my head gives way to a sort of sparsely planted wispiness towards the front of my head, and from either side a type of land-bridge grows to meet its mirror near the crown. This means, apart from a fastidious trimming and shaping to leave nothing but the sides, any hair growth veers towards true chaos.
When it grows outs, the hair on the top of my head is always reaching out in different directions, every strand for itself, lacking enough follicular mass to be tamed by any brush, comb, or dampened palm. No, having been abandoned and betrayed long ago by my hair, I can not afford any mercy on the shabby stragglers that remain. It is either clippers on a zero or a razor left to groom this mutinous lot of scalp bandits. Neatness demands of me a shaving, and I struggle to comply.

It isn't that this is a good look for me. When I still had hair, I let it run rampant-- pulling it back in a pony-tail to keep it out of the way, or in two tails on either side of my head when I was feeling pretty. It wasn't until I saw the large bald spot on the back of my head in a security camera that I realized that my youthful dreams of luxurious locks had had their run. I joined the ranks of the shaved that very night.

Bald looks good on some guys, but I have no illusions that I am one of them. I have a particularly large and enlumpened mellon, misshapen from too many blunt force traumas and too little high guard. The flesh of my scalp has a somewhat mottled look, and bug-bites and irritated follicles seem to map out fresh new constellations on my skull with each fresh shaving. The end result is a beady-eyed face peering out from a oddly shaped lump of dough that does little to please or distinguish. Mostly sporting the shaved head has served to teach me the value of hats and sunscreen, and the names of many professional wrestlers that kindly strangers are nice enough to shout at me while I lumber dully about in public. At least the look has become common enough to no longer be only suggest neo-nazis and circus strongmen.

That many other bald meaty fellows have adopted this look has to do with an inversion of an old hair-loss coping strategy. The comb-over, where one cleverly camouflages one's scalpular affliction with the deft combing of extra long hairs from one side of one's head over the naked and offending region, while still in existence, has given way to yet another act of tonsorial cowardice. This weak-kneed grooming tactic is, of course, the reverse comb-over.

The reverse comb-over, of which I am a confessed practitioner, is a simple procedure. Rather than concealing the shameful baldness with some mad combing science, one takes the bald spot and spreads it over the rest of the head. Thus, instead of pretending not to be bald, the clean shaved head suggests instead, "Hair? What hair." Or, in the words of World's Toughest Milkman Reid Fleming, "I'm not bald: I get my hair cut this way." It is like movie magic, only without the magic. Or any movie.

So fairly freshly shaved and virtually stubble free, I have answered the unasked questions that have been lingering deep in recesses of your dirty minds. What's a reverse-combover, and how can I get one? If you're so smart, why are you bald? And perhaps, most pressingly, "So what did you do with your Friday night?"