There's all the standard responses, none of which I will likely disagree with but something very profound occurred to me on the drive into work this morning:
My little corner of paradise, this morning didn't look much like a place that could rightfully be called the Sunshine State. In fact the weather was very reminiscent of my days passing through RAF Mildenhall in the spring, gray, drizzling and generally just pretty dismal. Traffic was slow. For reasons I've never been able to adequately explain, slightly damp pavement in Florida is roughly the equivalent of a horrendous ice storm anywhere else. For some reason people are convinced that if their vehicles go faster than about 20 MPH on wet pavement they can spin out of control and become a traffic fatality with little to no warning. So I'm sitting there in a rolling parking lot with my fellow happy idiots heading off to struggle for the legal tender. Then suddenly the question came to me "How many of these people stropped a razor this morning?"
I've been at this far too long to revel in the bravado of doing something that most people consider dangerous. In fact once I was over the initial learning curve it was just a bit sportier than brushing my teeth. These days, it's just the way I shave. True, we are a fairly exclusive group, not because we're bad ass enough to shave with what amounts to a really sharp knife. The honest truth about straight razor shavers that make us even more special is that we insist on being individuals. We don't care that the rest of the lemmings are growing beards or shaving with whatever the marketing machine has labeled the next big thing. We do things our way. We're free thinkers. In the modern age that's far more frightening than the threat of cutting your throat with a straight razor. I obviously can't speak for all of us but even before I shaved with a straight razor, people always found me a bit unusual, the addition of the straight razor however, propelled me straight to the Crazy Uncle section.