Move on, Movember.

Further to Sunday’s rant about charitable organizations: I’m not unsympathetic to the aims of the Movember movement, a movement designed to raise awareness of men’s health issues by encouraging men to grow a mustache for the month of November. Like, maybe the sight of all those lip caterpillars will encourage some dummy to make that appointment for that colonoscopy. I have no idea. But I am a man, and I have a certain amount of health, so men’s health issues are issues of mine.

 

I’m not wild about awareness raising. It’s been going on so long by so many people in so many ways that my awareness is about as raised as it can get. If it gets any higher I will lose contact with it altogether. Then I guess I will be unconscious.

 

But worse is my secret sorrow,* my woeful confession that tears my soul and makes me withdraw silently from participation in the jolly japes of Movember:

 

I grow a lousy mustache.

 

The Movember guys want us to grow a mustache for the thirty days of November as a means of raising awareness and sparking conversations. But it's futile. It would take more than thirty days for my mustache to become detectable with the unaided eye.

 

A pity, too, as we may be heading into a mustache Renaissance in which I cannot participate. Early American males were clean-shaven, emulating Ancient Rome, I suppose; in the next century all hirsute hell broke loose. Then we returned to an era of the naked face. Now we're deep in Beard Country, but it may lead to an invasion of the body 'stachers.

 

Should I give it another go? It's a tough call. It's like getting a tattoo, because it's not enough to just decide to get one; you also have to select the one you want.

Then again, maybe some faces just are not meant for mustaches.

*Not so secret, since I’ve admitted it before: “I don’t think I ever tried to grow one without the accompanying beard. My face is a bad neighborhood, and no mustache would want to go into it alone. Maybe when I was a teenager; some teenage boys grow mustaches for months on end and no one ever notices. I had that peachfuzz thing going on too." Read more about the decline of the American mustache here.