Honea Express

Posts Tagged ‘testicular’

“Why don’t you say something, Coach?”

The players all looked at me, ready to hang on my every word. They had no idea that I had never given a halftime talk before. They only knew that we were in the locker room of my old junior high school, and that I had a whistle around my neck.

They didn’t know that I had never played basketball for my school—or any sport, for any school. In fact, the closest I ever came was two glorious weeks on the track team.

My friends and I were asked to turn in our uniforms after we missed a meet. We had been in the locker room seeing who could spin a discus the longest and impressing each other with our favorite celebrity impersonations. I was right in the middle of my Doug Henning when the coach came in and told us to wait on the bus. Needless to say, I was not a jock, and it would only be a matter of weeks before I took center stage in the school production of whatever it was and never looked back.

I glanced at the head coach to make sure I had heard him correctly. He nodded and I took a breath. The floor was mine.

“I grew up here,” I said. “I’ve known their head coach my entire life.

“This was my gym. I went to my first dance here. I kissed a girl somewhere around the free throw line. It wasn’t that long ago that I was you, and moments like this would last forever. Every game was the big game.”

The room was quiet and the boys were anxious. I had no idea where I was going with this, and the other coaches knew it.

I proceeded to have an incredibly awkward one-sided conversation with a room full of teenage boys about things that had nothing to do with basketball. I painted a picture of my own (also) awkward youth and appealed to whatever sympathies their parents had planted in them. It may have been the worst halftime speech ever given, and by the time it ended I was sweating far more than the players.

We lost the game, and I was never asked to give another pep talk the rest of the season.

I was, admittedly, embarrassed—not because of the game, but because I had used their moment as some sort of therapy session I never knew I needed. I feared that I had lost whatever respect they may have had for me.

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Today is December 1, 2011 and according to the Mayans, the mustache has ended. This is good news.

Mustaches and my face do not get along. In fact, the only thing that looks worse on my face is a fist (or whatever dirty joke you just came up with). I actually wrote a musical about the experience of growing a mustache for charity and how torn I was about the process. On one lip, I was thrilled to raise money and awareness for Movember and the fight against prostate and testicular cancers — our Dad2.0 team raised over $19,000, and the good people at Philips Norelco are matching $15,000 of that thanks to a series of shaving videos that many of us have made. I would also like to add that Baby Showers for Guys is donating $500 to the team (which includes many of the DadCentric guys!) in the name of their contest winner (which appears to be me!). That’s roughly $35,000 to cancer research just by not shaving. If only all good causes were this lazy, we could find cures for everything!

But the bottom lip is, I look like a real creep with a mustache. Even more than usual.

My wife hated it. It put her on edge and made her meaner than normal. She just assumed I had nothing nice to say.

My kids hated it. They said that it was sharp and itchy. They had no idea.

Society hated it. I couldn’t walk across the school parking lot without people throwing cabbage and pitchforks at me. In other news, my cabbage and pitchfork resale business is doing great.

You’ll catch part of the aforementioned abandoned musical in the clip below. The line was, “I look like I live in my mother’s basement, but that will soon change with this product placement.” And then the Philips Norelco SensoTouch 3D (Model 1250XCC), the Jet Clean system, and the Vacuum Stubble and Beard Trimmer would all get up and dance. It just wasn’t in the budget.

Here is the shaving video I made for Philips Norelco:

I will never shave the second mustache. That one isn’t creepy at all.

And now, a rare photo of me without facial hair:

I must admit, I swore off electric razors a long time ago, but the Norelco worked like a champ. It’s nice to work with products you can believe in. I’m looking at you, my phone service provider.

In case you are concerned that my freshly-shorn lip may catch cold this winter, don’t worry, I’m growing a dogstache. It’s really quite warm:

Thank you to all that participated, donated and restrained themselves from calling the authorities during the Movember campaign. Here’s to hitting cancer where it taint, once and for all.

Disclosure: The Philips Norelco products mentioned in this post were provided for free in exchange for the shaving video embedded above. I would like to thank Philips Norelco for the shaving system and their generous contribution to our Movember team.

Today is November 30, 2011. Do you know where your mustache is?

This is the last day of Movember, if ever you wanted to donate to the fight against prostate and testicular cancer, then now is that time. Operators are standing by.

Hello, and welcome to Day 8. Perhaps you’ve noticed that there is a beard attached to my Movember mustache. This is due to one fact, I can’t decide what kind of mustache to grow. It’s a fair bet that I’m going to look like a total jackass regardless, but what kind of jackass?

I’ll have it sculpted by the next update. Save the letters.

If you’d like to donate to the DadCentric Movember Team and raise money to stop men from dying, well, good on you. Do it. Kick cancer in the butt. Also, balls.