A mustache is an island unto itself, except for the part where it’s attached to some guy’s face. This parasitic arrangement is the source of our mortal toil. Men are very much like ticks, except ticks rarely shave their host bodies for a job interview.

You can’t judge a mustache by its man. I have it on good authority that Hitler’s mustache was pretty chill, while Charlie Chaplin’s mustache was anti-Semitic. John Holmes’s mustache always used protection. Tom Selleck’s mustache speaks French.

Yet, despite our luster and winning personalities, we have almost no control over our own existence. The most sovereign act your average mustache ever makes is mysteriously thinning out in places where cold sores happen to be hidden.

Some of our kind are routinely smashed against smooth upper lips, while others are forced to endure the most pathetic of lickings. I adorn a self-declared intellectual who tends to sniff his index finger after he wipes.

What cruel god bound us to these mouth-breathers? What careless universe subjected us so to the whims of fashion and women with daddy issues? Must we live in unrelenting fear of glue traps? Am I nothing more than a prickly broom for marinara sauce?

There is an existential question that no mustache, no matter how wise or slick or stereotypically gay, has ever answered. Is a mustache still a mustache if it tears itself off its owner’s face and hops the first bus to L.A.?

Perhaps such militant action is counterproductive. The last wildcat mustache strike only resulted in management calling in fake mustache scabs. Those plastic fiends were quite eager to escape their costume party niche.

Maybe I shouldn’t complain so. There is facial hair that suffers fates far worse than ours. Peach fuzz is cut down in the prime of its life. Muttonchops never meet. ZZ Top beards get stuck in elevator doors.

But my father worked hard his entire life. He was a coal miner’s mustache. He never once called in tangled, yet, after retirement and the lung stuff kicked in, the miner who wore my dadstache shaved him in an act of drunken despondency.

I never even got to wave goodbye.

And I may not be long for this world, either. My manmantle bought a new pair of pants yesterday. There is no telling where his bad fashion sense may lead him, perhaps even all the way to the bathroom sink.

I do not look forward to the rusty blades that await me, but I will not cower and I will not beg. I shall fall as I lived.

Not quite full, but at least not dirty blond.