Weekend was full of Beginners AHA!! moments
Receiving a package from Whipped Dog Friday gave me lots of fun throughout the weekend. This weekend was full of AHAH!! moments which are flushed with the joy of discovery and satisfaction of success. This is the element of developing arcane skills which drives me further and strengthens the obsessive desire to learn more.
Working on a "feedback razor" from Larry, first the hones and then the strop just started talking to me. For the first time the components of sharpening a razor fell in place without a dogmatic chanting under my breath of principles and theories and advice and lessons of previous attempts. I just stepped into the zone and became one with a sharpening piece of steel. I wasn't honing and testing and stropping and checking and thinking. I was becoming a razor's edge.....so little mental stress so much muscle memory.
Well sitting comfortably marinating in the simple joy of accomplishment another flash burst my calm late evening just before retiring for the night. The obvious weakness in my shaving stroke(which has accounted for several blood lettings recently) suddenly became clear to me. I have been setting the razor carefully against my skin before starting a stroke. This is good method to allow a really sharp razor to slice given the least encouragement of tremor or loss of concentration. What I have observed in the myriad videos of accomplished tonsorial artists is constantly moving short strokes which starts above the skin and then glides ever so gently across it. The movement is decisive and slightly arcing. I have been slow and tentative and pressing the flesh. The pressure of the razor on my skin has been much lighter now not like when I started wet shaving but it has still been too heavy. Lacking the frequent razor burn of my first shaves, it had seemed I had mastered the pressure element but now clearly I was mistaken. I couldn't wait to prove it to myself.
This is the least likely time for a shave. The skin is sagging(if yours doesn't sag late in the day just wait a decade or two it will) and the hands aren't so steady and mostly the eyesight has lost the crispness it possesses in the morning light.
There before me lay my best ever honing effort waiting to be shipped back to the Whipped Dog and it seemed no better opportunity to evaluate my own work could present itself.
Slapping on a little mineral oil to only the most difficult places of my facial terrain was the first of two steps to prep for a shave test. Normally I shave straight from the shower and take 10 minutes or more to get my face ready for the onslaught of steel. The Omega boar's hair brush I got this week came out and quickly lathered some Proraso onto my face. If my insight was correct this should be easy pickins and if wrong I got plenty of styptic.
SUCCESS!!!!!!!!!! WOW THAT WAS EASY AND SMOOTH AND FUN. Not the slightest pulling or nicking or cutting or burn or difficulty of any kind on the most troublesome and poorly prepped area of my shaving grounds.
This opens up the real possibility of ATG passes something I had given up expecting.
It is 4 am and I am hoping for enough growth on my face to try this again later today. If I am correct it shouldn't be a problem. If I am wrong it won't be any worse than the intermittent failures of the past six months or so.
Now if my whiskers would just grow faster and denser.....I really gotta talk my brothers into letting me invigorate them with a good open blade shave.
This must be what Lynn alludes to at the end of each of his posts. HAVE FUN
