Anyway, back to you, Sonny. You’re going to have some hormonal shifts, too, just like your sister. Women will never appreciate the power of testosterone. When a boy hits puberty it’s like Jesse Pinkman set up a meth lab in your nut sack. You’ll have the uncontrollable urge to fight and fuck. You’ll make stupid decisions without thinking. And you’ll be angry. It’s weird. There’s a thing in life where up until your early twenties you’re angry, then you mellow out a little bit, but then when you turn fifty-three you get angry again. On both ends of the spectrum, you don’t give a shit and your anger makes you lash out. I call it the Alec Baldwin syndrome.

And of course this testosterone geyser is going to mean unintended and uncontrollable boners. Sorry, kid, this is just a storm you have to ride out. There’s only a brief window in life where you have control over your junk. As a teen, you have zero control. You can be watching Schindler’s List and get one. But when you’re my age, chances are you’ll be yelling at it to stand at attention. There’s a sweet spot in your late twenties and early thirties when you no longer have to grab and tuck the surprise boner into your waistband to get rid of it because they don’t happen so often. But right now, if you’re reading this anywhere between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five, be prepared that a stiff breeze can give you a stiff dick.

Your entire body is going to go through some changes and with those body changes, come body issues. You’re going to feel gangly and awkward. We have a national obsession with female body image. There’s all those Dove soap love-your-body-type ads. And as a dad, even I have to admit it is fucked up what our culture foists on girls. I don’t know if it’s okay to masturbate to your kids’ cartoons, but Disney princesses have no waists and giant boobs. The chick from Aladdin is crazy hot. What percentage of young girls watching those movies are gonna look like that? You would literally need your hips shaved off.

I feel bad for the girls, but what about the fellas? The Disney princes all have cleft chins, no waists and giant arms. There is no way that teenage boys can have that body without going on the juice. Every action figure is cut and has a hairless chest. If a girl aspires to look like a Disney princess or a Barbie doll all she needs to do is not eat. But boys need to get on HGH.

Women are always supposedly redefining beauty. They’ll put Lena Dunham on the cover of a magazine and say she’s brave and that she’s redefining beauty. Well, for your sake, Sonny, in this book I’m redefining male beauty. Now men with a double chin and a hairy ass are beautiful. I have decreed it.

Speaking of hairy, with puberty comes hair in new and interesting places. So let’s start at the head and work our way down, shall we?

Facial hair is a pain in the ass and I suggest you avoid it. If you got my genes you’re not going to be able to grow a decent beard anyway. I have the beard of a black man: short, curly and itchy. I get ingrown hairs and the beard is always patchy.

Maintaining a beard is just a time suck unless you’re a total dick like guys from the Jersey Shore who have to wake up at four in the morning to work their perfect sideburns. When you spend that much time working on your facial hair, you’re just a narcissist who likes to spend a lot of time looking at yourself in the mirror.

At least go all or nothing. Either grow a full beard so you don’t have to be bothered or shave every day or two and go clean. I’ve never understood the mustache. If you’re going to spend the time scraping a blade across your face, just finish the job. And it’s more than just the time. Dig this mustache thought.

Every other patch of hair on your body stinks: your armpits, your balls and your ass if you’re me. Yet we cultivate the one right under our nostrils. Why would you want a stink sponge right under your nose? That would be like sewing your balls to your upper lip.

Please don’t be that skinny young hipster guy with a beard. Beards are for guys that swing axes or play fiddles. Dan Hagerty or Charlie Daniels should have beards, not guys who punch up Adam Sandler scripts. A beard used to be something you earned. You were a lumberjack, a biker or a Civil War general. You haven’t earned a beard at twenty-three.

We’re currently in a facial hair free-for-all. We’ve gone through different phases throughout history, but now it’s game on. It used to be that you had the same mustache or beard everyone else had. Now it’s weird neck beards, or the Sharpie pinstripe, or the young guy with mountain-man beard right next to the guy with the waxed handlebar mustache. In the Mad Men era everyone was clean shaven and if they did want a mustache, they had one choice. Like all things for you kids nowadays, there’s too much variety.

Just as the facial hair guy who loves to look in the mirror, the guy who has a very demanding and meticulous haircut is a narcissist, too. I was getting my hair cut recently, and the guy who was in the chair next to me when I sat down was still there giving instructions long after I was gone. I have no idea how long he was there before I sat down, but I paid the parking meter for thirty minutes and it had seventeen left when I got back behind the wheel. Meanwhile, this dude was still in the chair. He was a Russian guy getting some complicated two-stage fade haircut. Why? Because that’s his one moment. His wife doesn’t listen to him, his daughter hates his guts, his boss is up his ass and he has a job where he uses that tape-gun sealing boxes somewhere. This was his time to shine. This was his “me time.” He’s not in a barber’s chair, he’s on a throne and his lordship will have it his way. He’s exerting his dominion over another person. It’s wielding power. But how satisfying can that actually be?

Let’s talk for a minute about the back of your hair. When you find a good barber shop (not a penny over twenty dollars, son), and it comes time for them to do the back of your neck they’ll ask if you want it square or round. Just do what your old man does and say, “How did you do it last time? What is it now? Whatever it is, just do that.” This whole conversation is a waste of time. Has anyone ever been passed over for a promotion, not gotten laid or gotten out of a moving violation because of what the back of their head looks like? I don’t know what the back of my hair looks like as I write this book. I’m an adult, I’m married, and I know whatever shape it is in will just grow out anyway. So I don’t give a fuck. My plan is, and yours should be, to spend as little time in that seat as possible. Every ten seconds extra I spend in the Model Cuts getting my thirteen-dollar haircut is ten seconds I could be making money and living my life. My hair is like the Terminator, it’ll be back.

If you can get the straight razor shave at an upscale place like the Art of Shaving, go for it once in a while. It feels good. That hot lather, straight razor shave is nice, and makes you feel like Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josie Wales or an old-time gangster. You get out of there and want to hit a saloon and a whorehouse. That said, I can’t sleep at night because the short leather strap used to sharpen the razor is called a strop. It looks like a strap and is shaped like a strap but for some reason is called a strop. This really bothers me for reasons that I cannot explain.

You’re going to start getting hair on your chest, too. Just let it be. It’s not even because the hair is difficult to tend to, it’s that the chicks who are attracted to the guys with shaved chests are the chicks who are attracted to all guys with shaved chests and therefore you’re getting someone who’s not going to stick around. A girl who is attracted to the narcissist who spends that much time manscaping is the kind of girl who you’re going to catch banging your fellow bare-chested buddy.