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A few weeks ago I joined our local Y, after a glorious fifteen year run of not darkening a gym door for any reason other than to vote. Man, it was a great decade-and-a-half -- not a single huff nor a hint of puff, and in all that time, the closest I ever came to a jockstrap was watching bar dancers at the Man Hole.

I thought it could go on forever, this life of not exercising. I felt great, ate whatever I wanted, and kept hovering around my fighting weight despite the near total lack of physical exertion. Beloved wife kept lying to me, telling me I looked great. Even my growing man-breasts had the appearance, if you didn't reach out and feel their udder-like softness, of well-developed pecs, from most angles and under select shirt fabrics.

I always thought that the myth about how guys suddenly balloon when they turn 40 was just one of those ha-ha's that went along with the milestone -- like those gag gifts at Spencer's that all have to do with diminished sexual stamina and/or mental sharpness e.g. those big banners proclaiming "Lordy, Lordy, Bob is Forty!" with a crudely drawn cartoon of a senile-looking guy with a big wet mark on the front of his institutional pajamas. I'll grant you, that's some funny, funny stuff. But it wasn't going to happen to me.

Then it did. So now I'm hitting the Y every day, trying to make up for lost time (like that's going to happen). Will I get abs of steel again? Dunno, never had 'em a day in my entire life. No, the best I can hope for at this point is to stave off that wet mark on the front of my jammies for as long as I possibly can. So I huff, and I puff, and I scurry on the Cybex like a hamster in his wheel.

The reason I bring all this up is because today I had my first-ever locker room shave. In all my years of playing high-school and college sports, and of working out in gyms as a young adult, my shaving and my locker room time-spentage never crossed paths. This was a first.

So I came prepared. I packed my gym bag dop kit with:

1 (one) Merkur Progress adjustable DE razor;

1 (one) pack of Merkur Platinum blades;

1 (one) Merkur travel brush

1 (one) tube of Trumper's rose shaving cream;

1 (one) bottle of Trumper's rose Skin Food.

I will say this for our local Y -- the showers in the men's locker room are fit for a king. Great pressure, plenty of hot water, and the soap dispensers are always filled with this really great-smelling almond-scented industrial soap that smells almost as good as Taylor's almond shaving cream, which itself smells like an almond pastry. Nice work, fellas, or gals as the case may be. You could've gone with that blue industrial soap that smells like laundry detergent, but you didn't, and I thank you.

I stand at the row of sinks after the shower and unload my tools, and it's then that I notice, for the first time, that the sinks lack stoppers. They're like the sinks at any public facility -- by design, you can't fill them and hence can't overflow them.

This is a problem. I like to fill the sink with hot water, let the brush soak, and then dunk my razor in after every face swipe to clean off the lather and whiskers. I can't do that with the locker room sink. I have to just let the hot water run, and rinse my razor that way.

Why is this no good? Because with the hot water running, I can't hear the razor cutting my whiskers. That little pinging noise -- especially loud when using the Merkur adjustable razors like the Progress in my hand -- is not only pleasant and satisfying to hear, but the primary sensory feedback agent I use to gauge whether I need to go over an area again or not. I'm like a bat when I shave -- if I don't hear that radar ping that tells me I'm cutting whiskers, I'm flying/shaving blind.

But I'm also acutely aware that other men are staring at me. And not just because I'm trying to wear a small workout towel around my waist. No, they're staring at my junk.

My shaving junk.

The young and the old, the buff and the saggy, they all check out my wetshaving rig. The younger guys are clearly confused, while the older men nod approvingly, and a few even give me fatherly smiles as they pass. I've seen a few guys catch a typical modern guy shave at that sink with a plastic disposable and some gel, but I haven't seen any old-school wetshaving before I broke out my junk and got to work.

I hadn't used a Progress in awhile -- nice. This is an excellent, excellent razor. I don't use it much lately because I tend to dick with the blade settings too much if I'm using an adjustable, but the Progress is my second favorite Merkur after the HD, and I always get a great shave with it.

The Trumper rose was a new one for me. This was the first time I've tried it. I love Trumper's violet and use it often, but never the rose. Just never got around to it, and then I fell hard for Taylor's rose shaving cream, so the Trumper kind of sat there unused. Well, this is good stuff, certainly, but I prefer the Taylor, to be honest. The Trumper isn't as dense, and makes a more runny lather with the same amount of water in the brush as when I use Taylor's rose. With a bit less water in the brush, the Trumper made a much nicer and thicker lather and worked fine, but didn't smell quite as all-out rosey as Taylor's. It's a fine cream, but I prefer the way the Taylor smells, and it's cheaper besides.

I had big misgivings about shaving with the hot water running the whole time, since I couldn't really hear anything that was happening with my shave. But just as a blind man's hearing becomes more sensitive to compensate, so did my sense of touch. Cut off from my usual whisker-blade-ping-hammer-anvil-stirrup-brain-hand-razor feedback loop, I focused on the physical "pings" traveling down the metal shaft of the Progress and into my hand to tell me where I needed to shave and where I didn't need to anymore because it was smooth.

Did I say smooth? I meant glass smooth. Maybe I should plug my ears every time I shave, or maybe I should go back to the Progress, now that I can shave without pressure for real. Whatever it was, I got the best shave I've ever had with the Progress, and that's saying something, because this razor's given me some of my high-water-mark shaves.

A quick slap-on of the Skin Food and I was done. My cheeks and neck felt so clean and smooth I kept caressing my face until I noticed that the guys were staring again, so I waited till I got to my car to start up again with the faceturbation. Remember, junior gumshoes, you can always spot a wetshaver by the disturbing way he caresses his own face, oblivious to public distaste for such odd behavior.

Or maybe it's shaving in public that's the secret to the spectacular shave I got today. Shaving as performance art? Is this the next step after finally mastering the no-pressure DE shave?

I think I'm to something. Now I'm going to haul all my favorite shaving products to the Y and test them out there, naked, in the public eye, with only the sound of the running faucet bouncing off the hard locker room walls to drown out the thunderous applause from the sea of orangutan-teated old men trying to wolf-whistle with no teeth.