I was a teenage wolfman

My wife recently redecorated our downstairs bathroom. This involved lots of paint, a new shower curtain, new towels, a crapload of hardware, various light fixtures and me in the shop building this:



It came out OK for slapping it together. In addition to all this new stuff, there is also something old. It's a large, soft, furry pad. You might think it sits outside the tub, so when you get out of the shower, you step on it to avoid getting water all over the floor. You would be wrong, because the furry pad of which I speak is the one on the inside of the tub. You know, the one that prevents the water from draining. The one that looks like a single, adventurous dread that has somehow escaped from Bob Marley's entombed head, traveled across the country stuck in the tire tread of an 18 wheeler, and has finally taken up residence in your tub drain.

Every day, I get out of the shower and every day, the last thing I do is clean the hair out of this drain. For a while, I blamed my wife. She has fairly long hair, and I figured even 5 or 6 hairs of that length would weave a pretty inpenetrable mat. Then she informed me that she's been taking showers upstairs for weeks. That leaves me with few alternatives. Either the hair fairy is sneaking into my bathroom at night, or it's all me, baby.

It must run in the family. When I was a kid, I would get so pissed off at my brother Houdini. He was a hairy little bastard, and he would never clean his hair out of the drain. Invariably I would be late for school, and I'd jump in the shower without looking at the drain first. After a while, something that felt like a cold, dead hamster would brush gently against my calf, and I would realize I was standing almost knee deep in my own filth. This is because his drain-hair plugs would work in teams -- one would plug the drain, and the other one would come after you. If you weren't paying attention, it was entirely conceivable that you could fish the one out of the way with your big toe, and be so relieved to see the water actually start moving that you would not even notice the other hairy beast stuck to the back of your leg.

When I was about 17, I got tired of it. I started collecting his drain hair. I didn't actually touch it -- It grossed me out. I would grab it with my mother's tweezers, and drop it into a tissue, and drop the tissue into a box. Then, after about 8 months of daily drain scoopings, I wrapped them up with a bow and gave them to him for christmas. My mother was extremely pleased. I think she may have puked when I suggested knitting him a sweater.

Where does this hair come from you ask? Well, you may not ask, but I ask, because that's what I do, and ostensibly, it is my hair. I've read that most people lose between 50 and 100 hairs a day. That, my hairy friends, is a buttload. At first I thought perhaps that particular area could be where all this hair in my drain was coming from, but it's a tough place to check out yourself while you're standing in the shower.

Why do humans have hair anyway? We certainly don't need it. Yeah, it looks cool and all, but really - what a major pain in the ass. And to think that a small, evolutionary adjustment could have spared us all from the embarrassment of the 80s.

Not that I'm saying it wouldn't bother me if I lost mine, but that's only because everyone else would still have theirs. Think about it. If everyone else was hairless, and you had hair, I have to believe that would be a worse situation, because I am pretty sure that other humans would hunt you down and kill you because you freaked them right the hell out.

So anyway, near as I can tell, while I can't deny that the hair in the shower drain comes from me, I can confidently say that it isn't coming from my pre-existing hair, because I don't seem to be missing any.

My current theory is that the heat from the shower triggers some sort of recessive lycanthrope gene from my mother's italian side, and it causes me to sprout hair only while I'm in the shower. Since the recessive gene is obviously defective, this quick growing hair has a weak root structure, so it instantly falls out.

It's the only explanation.