It’s been three days now since I shaved down to a moustache. This isn’t the first time my upper lip has been rug-adorned. Earlier this year, my role as a series of French, snooty, middle class types in a production of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels required becoming, in facial hair at least, both dirty and rotten.

yessssss it’s time has come

When you wear a moustache, you become the moustache, and the moustache becomes you. The idea of the self as a standalone entity is annihilated. No one looks at you and sees a confident young person, secure in their self image. They don’t even see someone frantically trying to assuage their own self-perception by hiding behind a set of whiskers. They see a monster. They see an abomination, some abhorrent hybrid manstache-beast. They react with contempt, with disdain. They react with fear.

I learned something about moustaches in my first outing. The danger triangle of the face is the area from the upper lip to the bridge of the nose, so named for the likelihood that infections in this area spread quickly to the brain. What Wikipedia’s article won’t tell you — despite my constant editing attempts — is that the roots of the moustache, once detached from the mediating effect of the beard, quickly pierce the cavernous sinus and plunge deep into the areas of the brain controlling reason and self image. Like a fungal infection in ants, this changes the behaviour — you know what, this moustache actually looks good! It’s retro, and cool! This eventually kills the host.

Moustaches aren’t just medically dangerous. They are a social canary in the coal mine; an early warning sign that your friends and family are plotting against you. Your paranoia is not just justified. It is a reflection of truth. My roommate has not mentioned that I look ridiculous. My family’s silence is both eerie and telling. My girlfriend actually says it looks good; her lies say more than honesty ever could. Perhaps they all know that the moustache will soon control me; perhaps they fear it’s power.

Why not remove it, you may ask? Why would you even suggest such a thing? Knowledge is true power, my friend, and knowing that no act of mine could affect my outer image more than the covering of my philtrum does is true power indeed. Knowing that the time and method of my demise has been predetermined by facial hair is true power. Foreknowledge of the treachery of everyone I love is true power, and it is power I will use. Trust is a lie. Life is an illusion. There is only one entity I can trust, one being formed of the fusion of hair and face. I am one with the Moustache, and the Moustache is one with me.