.

I was halfway out the front door in pre-workout Hobo Lite regalia -- shorts (okay, so they're bathing trunks from the Gap, but they have this netting inside that kinda sorta subs for a jock) , t-shirt, hadn't shaved yet (saving that for the Y) -- when friends of ours showed up at the appointed time for a visit I'd completely forgotten about, their car pulling up in front of the house just as I did a whiplash 180 and hauled ass back inside to throw on some pants and catch a rush-job shave.

You know the drill. No time to shave but no way you can go without one, so you pretend the fuse is lit and you've got thirty seconds to look presentable. To hell with "baby's butt smooth" and all that shavegeek hoo-ha. If you don't shave in under a minute, your boss will fire you/your wife will leave you/your puppy will die.

I know lots of guys who do this every morning -- they sleep till the last possible second, then tear ass through their grooming before running out the door to work. I used to do it myself, back in the days when shaving meant scraping a wretched Good News! disposable razor across my face with nothing but a squirt of canned goo for lube.

As soon as I slammed the bathroom door behind me I flashed through my options --

1. Nancy Boy shaving cream
Pro: Excellent shave, even when applied by hand without a brush.
Con: No time to unscrew the tub lid! Next!

2. Hot water-only shave
Pro: I've done it before and I'll do it again if I have to.
Con: Sucks unbelievably, lousy shave, beats up the face, I could go on. Think dammit think!

3. Ultra Shave
Pro: Excellent shave, no need for water, works as own aftershave.
Con: Now where did I put that can? I'm fucking hosed!

4. Just skip the shave
Pro: Saves 30 seconds I can apply toward expertly adjusting baseball cap that makes me look even more like a jackass than just walking around with bed-head.
Con: I would sooner greet guests wearing crotchless panties than skip shaving. On the other hand..

Then I remembered catching a shave once with Pacific Shaving Oil all by its lonesome, and you know something? It wasn't half-bad. Not as good as a full-on brush'n'cream geekathon, but it was pretty good and more importantly, fast as hell.

I didn't have a bottle of Pacific oil on hand but I did have some rosehip seed oil -- I've been using this as an amazingly effective aftershave, so I grabbed the bottle and hoped for the best. All I had time for was one downward pass, so I quickly splashed my face with hot water, rubbed about 10 drops of rosehip seed oil all over my face and neck, and started in with my Gillette Super Speed DE razor.

Bad, bad move. If I'd had a few more seconds to actually think this one through, I would've realized that rosehip seed oil is very different from sunflower oil, avocado oil, and all the other lube-happy ingredients in the various shave and pre-shave oils. Rosehip seed oil absorbs into the skin very quickly, and what lube there is doesn't last very long. So basically, I got a hot water-only shave after all.

And man, did it suck. The DE blade painfully tugged and pulled on every single whisker, like it was trying to yank them out by the roots instead of lop them off cleanly at skin level. And this was with an Israeli Personna blade in a 40s Super Speed, which isn't an aggressive rig at all.

In fact, this horrible shave was like a flashback to the old days, when I used to hate shaving because it hurt while I was doing it and then my skin felt raw all day long. I've got it so good now with the brushes and the high-quality creams and the old-school safety razors that I forget how dreadful a shave can be without all this stuff I've grown so accustomed to.

I think the one thing that doesn't really get spelled out to newbies in all the "How To Shave Old-School" essays on the Net, mine included, is that the whole drill of using hot water, a badger brush, and quality glycerine-based shaving cream on your face is all about softening your whiskers so the blade cuts through them like wet spaghetti. It's not just about making your skin slippery.

Keep your face wet with hot water for at least 2 minutes and lather up with some good glycerine shaving cream, and you can get an easy, painless shave with pretty much anything above a Flicker. Most guys who try it for the first time wonder why the razor isn't cutting anything, because all the hair-tugging and pain they've gotten used to is suddenly gone, forever.

My face looked like hell and stung all day long. I looked worse than if I hadn't shaved and just joined our guests looking like a comfortable bum instead of a pained jackass in a baseball cap pulled low on his bed-head and wearing a pair of jeans over swimming trunks so the telltale bulge made it look like I was wearing adult diapers.

How am I married?