December 26th was a morning like any other.

I woke up with the expected bleary eyes and rancid breath of one who had spent far too many hours the night before playing Morrowind and eating Funny Bones. After greeting the morning with my usual “Argh! The light enrages me.” I slithered from my side of the bed and made my way to the bathroom to relieve the insistent pressure of 8 hours worth of liquid refuse buildup. After milking my loins dry I proceeded to the sink to wash my hands and possibly brush my teeth.

“Salutations!”
“Huh?”
“Good morning!”
“Who said that?”
“Me!”
“Who that say ‘me’?”
“Me say ‘me’!”
“Who that say ‘me say me’?”
“Me! Boris!”
“Who the hell is Boris?”
“Me! Right here! Hello! Good morning!”

Looking into the mirror I finally caught a glimpse of the owner of the terminally chipper voice and felt my soul shrivel up and die inside me. For there, right before me in the bathroom mirror, was the one thing that no man wishes to see in his lifetime. The one thing that will prove to him beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is old, OLD, OLD and should simply be put out to pasture in sympathy, or given a quick and painless mercy death by his closest kin.

I had a nose hair.

Not your everyday garden variety nose hair, either. No, that would be far too ‘normal’ for one such as me. What I had wasn’t so much a nose hair as it was the probing tentacle of some giant nostril squid searching for prey upon the open fields of my upper lip. It stuck out a good quarter inch from my nose and vibrated happily with every breath I took.

I swear to you, it looked frickin happy.

But the worst part wasn’t that it was so happy, so thrilled to have seen the light of day. The worst part was that it was there at all. I mean, when I went to sleep the night before I had no idea that I would wake up with a mutant hair sprouting forth from my nose like a miniature tendril of shame. It grew there overnight and somehow managed to grow longer and faster than any hair I’ve ever heard tell of before. And so now, there it sat. Torturing me with its blatant disregard for my mental and emotional well being and knowing full well that it would take years of expensive therapy for me to recover from the psychological effects of its appearance in my life.

Well, one thing was certain. The little bastard had to go, and go now.

Grabbing my handy-dandy tweezers from the ‘In Case of Emergency – Break Glass’ box next to the medicine cabinet, I clasped the bastard by his tiny, pointed head, grimaced in anticipation and gave the offending hair a mighty yank.

And fell, screaming in pain, to the bathroom floor.

I had not realized that such a small thing could cause such a great amount of pain. Apparently, the teensy-tiny hair had its roots located somewhere deep within my frontal lobe and my attempt to remove it from my nose had started a chain reaction of pain so intense that fireworks went off behind my eyes and black spots appeared in my vision. Looking at the tweezers in my hand I realized with a start that there was no hair held between the two tiny clamps. Somehow, the evil hair had managed to retain its grip and still protruded prominently from my nose.

And he was humming.

With teary eyes and a faint whimper, I once again raised the tweezers and prepared myself for pain.

“Hey! That’s not very neighborly of you! What ever happened to a home baked pie and a hearty, ‘Welcome to the neighborhood’?”
“Shut up hair. You’re a blight upon my very existence and I will purge you from my being if it’s the last thing I ever do.”
“You know, that’s really going to hurt.”
“I know.”
“It’ll hurt you more than it hurts me!”
“I know.”

The tweezers grasped his tiny head and I steeled myself for the pull.

“Why not live and let live?”
“Don’t try to talk me out of it, devil creature. You must be destroyed before you spawn and if that means giving you freedom from my nose while causing myself great pain in the process, so be it.”
“I don’t want freedom! I just wanted to see what it looked like outside! I’m scared!”
“If I could, I’d put your root on a spike and sit it at the entrance to my nose as a warning to all the other hairs to never grow beyond their boundaries.”
“You’re a very sick man, you know that?”
“Yes.”

With that I yanked good and hard on the tweezers. The last thing I heard before I blacked out was a tiny voice screaming, “Freedom! Noooo! Cruel and horrible freedom!”

Then, the darkness claimed me.