A big hairy deal

cropped — OK, so there is a 4:00 shadow, but at least the eyebrows, nose and ear hair is all neatly trimmed — I think. And I’ve also often been told I have great eye lashes.

The sage who first said life isn’t fair must have been a hairy bald guy.

A hairy bald guy, you ask. Isn’t that an oxymoron?

Sadly, the answer to that question is no. An emphatic no. And take it from someone who knows.

An irony of my life as a 40-something is my ability to grow lots of hair in places it’s not wanted — nose, ears, eyebrows and … back — while having no hair atop my large head. Adding insult to injury is the fact that what hair is left on my head seems to grow at a freakishly fast rate.

But not even that hair can keep up with the weed-like hairs in my nose and ears. Or my eyebrows, from which recently I trimmed a hair that was at least a half-inch long. And this happened some 10 days after I had last trimmed them. I remember it because I had just gotten new contact lenses, which made seeing the length of my eyebrows much easier. They could no longer hide behind my glasses.

Yeah, I know the ladies have it much worse than guys. For anyone who doesn’t think so, just contemplate two words: Bikini waxes.

Still, this unwanted hair is a pain in the neck. If I were to shave all of it off and put it in a pile, it would dwarf the wisps that fall to the floor from a regular haircut.

It’s enough to make me wonder what Kyan Douglas would say. He was one of the hosts on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” a show on the Bravo cable-TV network for much of the previous decade. I would sometimes watch and chuckle along with the five gay men who hosted the show as they made over some heterosexual schlub. Often this entailed a lot of grooming under the supervision of Douglas. The “Queer Eye” guys referred to it as manscaping.

Now I know I was too quick to laugh at the other schlubs because all of this extraneous hair isn’t as funny as it used to be. Once upon a time, I was even proud of it. I remember once in high school, when one of the cool girls approached and tugged at the front of my shirt. She and her friends laughed when I yelped. Much later, I learned they had been speculating about boys they knew who might have chest hair — and my yelp probably won a bet for one of them.

I‘m just glad that was a long time ago — back when I still had enough hair to part it down the middle and feather it back. Ah, the ’80s. Most everyone then called me Moose, which I thought was a pretty cool nickname.