A break from the regularly scheduled tastelessness

Is tastelessness a word? Too many alveolar fricatives in one semantic unit.

I’ve been growing out my facial hair since USC lost to UCLA in the beginning of December. It’s just something I do: don’t shave from game one until whenever the Trojans lose, and once they do lose immediately begin a new beard on Sunday. A mourning beard. An Asian mourning beard, so a sparse mourning beard.

If USC advances to a bowl game and wins, I don’t shave until Signing Day. BCS title game? Not until the NFL Draft. So Signing Day it was!

(Boooo.)

I’ve also been growing my hair out. The European cities I was stuck in during the summer and fall did nay believe in providing a buzz at 5 units of currency. Now: I’ve been shaving my own head since I was 14, and I’d be damned if I was going to pay 15 euros to have someone else spend ten minutes on something I could do in five minutes, so grow it out I did. It was extremely weird having hair, and I looked forward to giving myself a mohawk and dyeing it cardinal and gold in anticipation of the Fiesta Bowl.

(Boooo.)

After the UCLA debacle and the Michigan stomping I set my sights on Feb. 7: National Letter of Intent day. This was set in stone. Diverging from the chosen path would result in horror upon horror and evil too evil to be described except by using a superfluous “evil”. Don’t mess with a streak, etc. etc.

I messed with the streak last Friday. This was me before…

Fear my intense googly eyed hairy stare.

This was me between…

I look like I know what I’m doing, I know.

And this is me now.

Gravity, meet thy doom.

Normally I’d reserve this post’s spot for something about recruiting. It is, after all, National Letter of Intent day, and USC is hauling in some good ones. I was all ready to do an epic fifteen page long David Foster Wallace imitation about a week spent on the recruiting trail with Pete Carroll. I had an entire footnote prepared about the kind of creepy Triumph of the Will vibe you get when recruits are cheered by an entire stadium/arena. I had footnotes on the footnotes about belly dancers at “official visit” dinners at the Papadakis Taverna. I planned to use made up mathematical formulas named after obscure G.I. Joe characters to illustrate the essential chaos of recruiting. Instead, this post is about me shaving my beard and giving myself a mohawk before the date I’m allowed to do so, a serious transgression of arbitrary but cruelly effective boundaries the mere thought of which make me twitch my thumb towards my mouth, feet already curling into fetal position. If you’ve ever met a sports-obsessed freak (or, more likely, if you are one), then you know that screwing with a streak is the surest way to screw with whatever semblance of balance you might have.

Why did I do this? Because Friday was the last day of chemotherapy for my older brother, and why the hell not? It’s a celebration, bitches. With mohawks. Mohawk. Whatever.

“And I’m Ron Burgundy. Go fuck yourself, cancer.”