The Law of Moustache

The Law of Moustache

"Nice chest hair." My wife says to me. A rather unexpected comment, considering I'm wearing a collared shirt. I brush it off and resume my work. A few minutes later; "Nice chest hair." My wife rarely comments on my appearance, (which probably says something) and why she was picking that feature didn't make any sense to me. "Whatever" I mutter as I leave the room, pre-occupied in thought with household bills.

And then I see it. My two top buttons have been undone! Now this is the bona-fide truth: I have no memory of undoing my buttons: I'm rather diligent with my buttons in fact, and this particular shirt has extra buttons that I like keeping done up, so this struck me as a surprise. The collared shirt with the low buttons and tuft of chest hair sticking out raised my sleaze factor significantly and I winced at my appearance.

I know that I didn't unbutton my shirt. This has never happened before. There is only one factor that is different in my life this month, and that is the fact that I have decided to grow a handlebar moustache. Suddenly, it all makes sense. No rational person could ever choose to create the abbhorent sleazy moustache-and-chest hair look. As I discovered this morning, The fact is that moustaches repel buttons. Sleazy facial hair begets sleazy body hair, like begets like, it all makes sense now. No one deliberately designed the sleazy look, it just kinda happens to a guy when he fails to shave his upper lip.

Moustaches can be likened to evil. Evil is the great inscrutable mystery: it defies rational explanation. Try if you will to even define evil. The greatest philosophers through the centuries have noticed that evil can only be described in terms of privation of the good. That is, evil isn't anything, it's a distortion, a lack of what the good is. Evil is disorder, lawlessness, irrationality. Evil is that which is juxtaposed to all that is good, benevolent and orderly. If evil could be explained, it would disappear, for if evil could be explained that would be conceding that it submits to rational categories and may be harmonized with a logically ordered universe. But evil is disorder, it is the very evilness of evil that defies explanation.

Moustaches are like that. They are a privation of good fashion sense, a violation of the laws of aesthetics, a senseless affront to beauty. Hence, they repel buttons and turn respectable gentlemen into perverted-looking sleazebags.

Moustaches are an evil that has chosen to bypass the female gender and afflict only males. However more depraved the world may be due to the presence of moustaches, it pales in comparison to another greater evil that afflicts only men: prostate cancer. This is why I have chosen to bear the Mo this month: to bear this unsightly burden as a reminder to the world that we men face a far greater peril than unsightly facial hair.

In Canada, 4,300 men will die of Prostate Cancer this year. For this reason, men all over the world are growing moustaches this month of "Movember" to proclaim the plight of our fellow men with oversized and diseased prostate glands.

The good news is that prostate cancer is preventable, and relative to a few other cancers, actually has a high survival rate. Possibly for this reason, it is often deemed an insignificant disease. Nevertheless, it still afflicts 1 in 6 men, and 24,600 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year alone, not including undiagnosed cases due to an unwillingness on many men's part to get regular check-ups. The worst part is, like the moustache, prostate cancer death is preventable. I encourage you, if you have enjoyed this blog post, found it informative, or at least gave you a smile, please consider donating to Prostate Cancer Canada. http://www.prostatecancer.ca/ Every cent counts. Research must continue, prevention must take place, and awareness needs to be raised. None of this can take place without adequate funding. Last year Canadian "Mo bros" raised $7.8 million for Prostate Cancer Canada. Let's keep up this generous tradition.

Even if prostate cancer isn't a visible, in-your-face evil, the moustache is, and the sooner we rid the earth of this disease, the sooner we can get around to enjoying our Novembers moustache-free.