If, as comedian Bill Cosby once quipped, gray hair is God's graffiti, consider me as indelibly tagged as the Punahou overpass.

As a high school classmate recently said, "Geez, didn't we used to be the same age?"

The occasional gray hairs have been popping up since my mid-20s, inspiring more curious bemusement than alarm. In recent years, however, serious pockets of melanin resistance have established themselves all over that unfortunate mass I call a head. Each year the salt-to-pepper ratio tips saltward.

I was one of those shaved-head guys when the first large patch of gray stubble started to sprout above the right side of my forehead, giving my already receding hairline a sort of diseased-looking asymmetry. I re-grew my hair pronto. The patch has since grown out into a pronounced white streak that makes the totality of my hair look like the victim of a crappy high school peroxide experiment or, on really bad bad-hair days, like a toupee made of skunk.

I'm assured by charitable friends and family that the grays make me look distinguished. They remind me that judges, legislators and other big shots used to don powdered wigs precisely to effect the air of wisdom, prosperity and authority that gray hair naturally evokes. (And if that's the case, I suppose I should go ahead with that order of knee-high leggings.) Still, as the amply gray-haired 19th century transcendentalist George Bancroft once noted, gray hair may be a crown of glory, but they are also "the only object of respect that can never excite envy."

My somewhat premature grays are an interesting visual counterpoint to the mouthful of braces I've been carrying for the past three years. Bartenders and liquor-store clerks always think I'm trying to pull something. Driver's license says I'm 37, hair says I'm 47, braces and general lack of maturity say I'm an enormous, gray-haired 12-year-old with an apparent thing for Scotch.

However the coup de coif plays out on my head, I'm not going to fight the outcome. I'm not going to dye it (although I did for my wedding) and, obsessive compulsive that I already am, I'm not going to invite trichotillomania or any disorder that can lead to baldness in any attempt to tweeze whitey.

And you can bet a case of Grecian Formula that I will not post an ad on Craig's List seeking someone to pluck his or her gray hairs for $40 an hour.

Nope, I intend to fade to gray gracefully.

Wasn't it the chemically serene Jerry Garcia who once sang, "Oh well a touch of gray kind of suits you anyway."

I'll have what Jerry was smoking.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.