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Looking back, losing my hair was inevitable.

I come from a long line of bald dudes. My family has, on the whole, more women than men, but all of the DNA-involved males in my family had little-to-no hair in adulthood. I get my baldness honestly.

I had an inkling that I was in trouble in high school, when I made a variety of questionable sartorial choices. I had feathered bangs, the hairsprayed middle part and the inevitable mullet. But for a time, I actually did have a lot of hair and was pretty excited about it. Once I told the woman at Fantastic Sams that I wanted hair like Steve Winwood’s on the “Chronicles” album cover, even going so far as to bring the CD booklet in. I like to think she did her best with what she had to work with.

By the start of college, though, things were getting real. I’d abandoned the last of my rednecker aesthetic — I heard Huey Lewis sing “I guess I cut my hair” one Saturday morning and took it as a portent — and had cultivated an agreeably nerdy side part, but the hairline was in full retreat. Not like an Eddie Munster widow’s peak; I was trending more into George Costanza territory.

I was able to cling to some semblance of full coverage into my mid-20s, but seeing the occasional photograph of myself from behind told the story that the mirror did not: I was fighting a war on both fronts, with a bald spot from behind and the ever-thinning hairline. There would, inevitably, be a meeting in the middle, and I’d be sporting the full Lobot. Something had to be done.

At the time, Rogaine was kind of a thing but I was still young and broke and the idea of having to use prescription cream for the rest of my life to possibly hang on to the smallest sprigs of hair just seemed stupid and vain. Better to turn into the torpedo, I decided, and shave it.

It was the week of Halloween, so my brainiac idea was to dress up as Michael Stipe who was famously bald during this “Monster” period. My rationale was that if the shave was a disaster and my skull was an undiscovered lumpy disaster that I could use the costume as an excuse and wear hats for the rest of the semester. I went to a SuperCuts or some such like on Broadway and told the woman what I wanted. She asked me several times if I was sure, like I was getting a dirty Spongebob tattoo during Mardi Gras, and went to work.

And I’ve never looked back. I’ve saved myself thousands of dollars in haircuts over the past 25 years, buzzing my hair every ten days or so, and at this point I can’t imagine having to deal with bad hair days (or, for that matter, hair days at all). I can roll out of bed into a video meeting and no one is any the wiser. Despite all of the medical interventions available now, baldness is a pretty acceptable choice in the world. Sean Connery, Ed Harris, Patrick Stewart, Lex Luthor — lots of cool dudes have accepted fate and genetics and embraced the cue.