Author’s Note: A few friends that frequent my blog asked what’s been going on with me lately? They said that I didn’t seem myself with all the encouragement and motivational type blogs that I’ve been up to lately, not that encouragement and motivation suck, but it is a departure from the material that usually occupies this space. I told them that I would attempt to find my way back to that type material so I give you today, a story about my near death experience. Obviously. -Skrap
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I have yet to find a way to slow the calendar so birthdays continue to come but getting a little older doesn’t mean that I have to resign myself to feeling lethargic and heavy, right? At some point we have all looked at ourselves in a mirror and perhaps come to the realization we should take better care of ourselves. But then we get lazy and we find the our food better when its fried and before you know it two months have passed and we’ve still not managed to get our tails off the couch and onto a treadmill. It would be so simple if we just had the ability to decide to do better and then make better happen; most of us, though, need a severe kick in the hindquarters in order to get ourselves together. I got my wake up call during the final week of January of this year when I nearly died, kind of.
Manscaping. It’s a necessary evil some of us males occasionally undertake. I won’t bother with the gory details of the act but will only offer that it is needed in order to keep the jungles that threaten to grow wild “down there” at bay. Everyone has likely seen Ron Jeremy at least once in their lives and quite frankly no one needs to look like that on purpose. So we break out the razors to shear ourselves in our areas most precious to remain more human than bear.
Without the benefit of a mirror in the shower, I was left to my own devices visually as I prepared to go weed whacker onmyself. I stood there preparing for war but, daggone it, my tummy was in the way. Now look, I’m an athlete, I’m active, I still play sports often and fairly well – softball, basketball, soccer, flag football – but even with the sporting prowess that I still possess (depending on the day) it seems I no longer have the metabolism to keep up with my chicken finger / chicken wing intake, thus, my tummy. I shook off the disappointment at what my body has become there under the water’s spray and I do what I have to do, I ready the razor and then 1…2…3…INHALE, and suck the tummy in so I can see what I’m aiming at down there. The process was:
Inhale and hold. Trim. Release the tummy. Deep gasping breath and then repeat.
It was cool the first couple of times through but I realized pretty early on this process this was going to take a while since it had been a minute since my last manscaping effort. Beads of sweat started to form on my brow as the chore of getting those hard to reach whiskers became more challenging. It was on my 4th or 5th “Suck in Tummy” cycle that I had the dizzy spell. I’m guessing that holding in a fair amount of Buddha belly while bent slightly at the waist wielding blades while standing in a poor man’s sauna was a more taxing than I ever imagined it could be. Initially I was too caught up in the task at hand to realize that I could very well pass out but then the spell hit fast and hard. The shower spun a little bit as I stood there trying to see past my midsection. I steadied myself on the shower wall but the shower spun again, faster this time, and I struggled to get my bearings. It was at this point that I needed to show some resolve and will myself out of this episode. As my head continued to spin I had this mini conversation with myself as I leaned against the wall under a spray of water that had now gone from hot to increasingly lukewarm:
“Look man, I don’t know what you’re going through right now, but you’ve got to get yourself right. If you pass out in this shower and bump your head on the soap dish or something no one is gonna find you for a minute because you’re the only person with a key to your house! Is that what you want? To be found 2 weeks later lying in the shower? Of course not, but I’ll tell you something that you don’t want even more though. Having a doctor walk out of your autopsy and explain to your Mother and Father that the reason you were found dead in your shower with half shaved balls was due to lack of oxygen to the brain from repeated attempts to hold in your too large stomach while shaving your nether regions. That is what you DON’T want, sir!”
And that’s when I found the guile to get myself together, rest a second, and then be about the business of finishing my task there in the shower because there was no chance that I wanted my Mama to attempt to explain that cause of death to the family as they stood around after my funeral, I have relatives that talk too much, I can’t risk that being my legacy to the world.
That near death experience (hyperbole, much?) was the impetus for me getting back into the gym and I’ve been a steady fixture there since the end of January. I’ve lost 8 pounds so far and I’m down 2 inches in my waist but I’m far prouder now that when I’m standing in my shower and I look south don’t see as much tummy anymore which should make my next round of manscaping far less life threatening. I’ll keep you posted.
~thanks for reading
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The Last Atlanta Native 
Ha! This most comical part of this is that we were having the same experience and epiphany around the same time. At least you finished. My nethers resembled a mangy mutt when I threw in the towel. All because of opting out of my normal waxing due to budgeting. Yes, I’m working on the bulge myself. Glad you made it out safely. I still, however, would engrave ‘the manscaping didn’t kill him’ on your tombstone. Think about.:)