Originally posted to devincf.com, home of all awesomeness
Hello, faithful readers. I sit here before you with a beer and a couple of pills on the day dedicated to love, mourning the loss of mine. My own love. The special thing in my life. My hair.
And not from baldness (although Christ knows that sneaky fucker is working his mojo on the old mop. In the war between my forehead and my hair, my forehead has been gaining ground at a rate almost like Germany in Poland). No, this was self-inflicted.
Wait, not self-inflicted! I will not take this guilt on myself! The blame lays squarely on the shoulders of Natasha, the lovely young lady (part time model/actress, she did some Burger King work it turns out. One of the “urban themed” ads) who has been doing my hair for the last two years. Which means my last two haircuts – I don’t really deal with my hair a lot. I cut it and let it grow out for a year or so and then decide I need a change again.
I’ve been thinking it was time to get the hair cut again for a while – since before my California trip, but I was nervous to visit L. with a really terrible new hairdo. I felt more secure in the old terrible hairdo – at least I actually knew what it looked like. That’s the thing about a new haircut – not only may it be bad, there’s this whole factor of you just don’t know what the fuck your head looks like. You haven’t been catching glimpses of it in mirrors for weeks or months. My mangy mop of manageless curls may have looked awful, but it was an awful I was used to. Sort of like how fans of The Darkness must feel. “This sounds like the awful shit I grew up on!”
Anyway, the time was past due. My hair was just doing whatever it liked, and in the windy winter I found that what seemed like a managed coif would, by the time I got to the office, more likely resemble the hair of someone who had taken a few gees. I made the appointment yesterday.
I should have been listening to the portents hitting me the last few days – no fewer than three people counseled against a haircut. “It’s beauteous,” my friend C. said (and she talks like that, really). I told her it was just out of control. “It’s like the physical embodiment of your psyche!” she said, and then began a serious round of lolling at me. But just like that time I answered that ad in the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine and got enmeshed in the anti-communist guerrilla warfare in South America, I thought I knew better.
It’s important to understand two things about me: I’m blind and I’m stupid. I usually take my friend R. with me to all these important functions - she tells the hairdresser what to do with me. I’m incapable of explaining what I want my hair to look like, and I’m not the type to bring a picture in to the shop. Although after today that may change.
So we’ve established that I’m stupid. That I need someone to come with me (at age 30) to get my haircut. (My haircut history is a bad one – I never liked it, and my parents being hippies I always had longer hair. There were occasions where I would start crying in the barber’s chair. I was afraid it would hurt. You can find these stories and more in my new book, A Brief History of My Neuroses, Vol 1: Ages 1 to 3). But the real crux of what makes this story a tragedy is that I’m blind. Without my glasses, I can’t see a thing. The world looks like I’m standing nose to a pointillist painting. So when I sit in that chair and Natasha has me take off my glasses, I’m helpless. Like a fuzzy little bear whose mother has been taken down by trappers. Like a little puppy caught in the rain. Like some sort of cute little animal in a tough situation, whichever one it takes for you to feel sympathetic towards me.
“So how do you want it?” Natasha asks. This, as they say (and by they I mean people who relish clichés, people like me), was the moment of truth.
“Let’s get rid of it. Cut it to just above the ears.”
Can we examine this statement? I know I’m sending mixed messages here. “Let’s get rid of it” sort of sounds like Harry Truman’s thoughts on Hiroshima in early August 1945. I realize (now) that I may have been signaling to Natasha that I was here on a clearcutting mission.
But my next sentence! “Cut it to just above the ears.” Do Natasha and I share the same basic anatomy? Or did she take this to mean the part of my ear that literally attaches to my thick fucking skull?
She began cutting. I couldn’t see what was going on, so I just smiled. I felt her begin taking hair in big chunks (and this makes sense – if you look at a picture of me you wouldn’t get a sense of how long my hair REALLY was, it’s very curly). Suddenly, though, Natasha took this chunk from the top of my head. I felt wind blowing across portions of my scalp that had never been exposed. I squinted helplessly into the mirror, trying to make sense of the blurry mess looking back at me. I knew something had gone awry, but what?
I trusted Natasha. Last year she gave me a top notch cut. Like the kind you see on Queer Eye. How could I have known that this time I would end up looking like the queer guy? As she kept cutting I knew I was doomed, but what could I say? “Glue that shit back on!” just wouldn’t cut it. I accepted my fate and began trying to imagine how bad it could be. I tried to imagine worst case scenarios, like the Pentagon coming up with casualty numbers from a nuke hit on Manhattan.
I was woefully unprepared.
I will say that I made it halfway home before putting my baseball cap on (the cap carries some irony to it, we’ll get there in a minute). I tried to make the best of it. But the head that stared back at me in reflections from store windows was a monstrosity. Well, moreso than usual.
“It looks like Brad Pitt in Oceans Eleven!” Natasha said (it’s an Oceans Eleven cap, thus bringing the “irony” into play. Yeah, it wasn’t that good, I know.) It sort of looks more like George Clooney, if he was inducted into the army. And was fat and had an unkempt beard.
I have no hair on my head. An informal survey has revealed my hair is one fingernail long. It’s swept forward into some kind of Caesar cut, like what was popular amongst people I hated in 1998. My beard is longer than my hair. I could join the army and they wouldn’t have to give me a trim.
Every time I walk past the mirror in the hallway I get startled. Who is this guy with the big head and the bad hairdo?!? It’ll grow out, but the hours already feel like weeks - how will the weeks feel? There’s probably a math equation in that.
The kicker is that I paid 37 bucks plus tip for this. Frankly, I wish Natasha had just beat the shit out of me, taken two twenties from my wallet and sent me home. Had I been given that choice – the choice between a rotten and sort of gay looking haircut and a vicious beating at the hands of a girl – I would be writing a humorous essay about my shattered clavicle right now.
Hello, faithful readers. I sit here before you with a beer and a couple of pills on the day dedicated to love, mourning the loss of mine. My own love. The special thing in my life. My hair.
And not from baldness (although Christ knows that sneaky fucker is working his mojo on the old mop. In the war between my forehead and my hair, my forehead has been gaining ground at a rate almost like Germany in Poland). No, this was self-inflicted.
Wait, not self-inflicted! I will not take this guilt on myself! The blame lays squarely on the shoulders of Natasha, the lovely young lady (part time model/actress, she did some Burger King work it turns out. One of the “urban themed” ads) who has been doing my hair for the last two years. Which means my last two haircuts – I don’t really deal with my hair a lot. I cut it and let it grow out for a year or so and then decide I need a change again.
I’ve been thinking it was time to get the hair cut again for a while – since before my California trip, but I was nervous to visit L. with a really terrible new hairdo. I felt more secure in the old terrible hairdo – at least I actually knew what it looked like. That’s the thing about a new haircut – not only may it be bad, there’s this whole factor of you just don’t know what the fuck your head looks like. You haven’t been catching glimpses of it in mirrors for weeks or months. My mangy mop of manageless curls may have looked awful, but it was an awful I was used to. Sort of like how fans of The Darkness must feel. “This sounds like the awful shit I grew up on!”
Anyway, the time was past due. My hair was just doing whatever it liked, and in the windy winter I found that what seemed like a managed coif would, by the time I got to the office, more likely resemble the hair of someone who had taken a few gees. I made the appointment yesterday.
I should have been listening to the portents hitting me the last few days – no fewer than three people counseled against a haircut. “It’s beauteous,” my friend C. said (and she talks like that, really). I told her it was just out of control. “It’s like the physical embodiment of your psyche!” she said, and then began a serious round of lolling at me. But just like that time I answered that ad in the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine and got enmeshed in the anti-communist guerrilla warfare in South America, I thought I knew better.
It’s important to understand two things about me: I’m blind and I’m stupid. I usually take my friend R. with me to all these important functions - she tells the hairdresser what to do with me. I’m incapable of explaining what I want my hair to look like, and I’m not the type to bring a picture in to the shop. Although after today that may change.
So we’ve established that I’m stupid. That I need someone to come with me (at age 30) to get my haircut. (My haircut history is a bad one – I never liked it, and my parents being hippies I always had longer hair. There were occasions where I would start crying in the barber’s chair. I was afraid it would hurt. You can find these stories and more in my new book, A Brief History of My Neuroses, Vol 1: Ages 1 to 3). But the real crux of what makes this story a tragedy is that I’m blind. Without my glasses, I can’t see a thing. The world looks like I’m standing nose to a pointillist painting. So when I sit in that chair and Natasha has me take off my glasses, I’m helpless. Like a fuzzy little bear whose mother has been taken down by trappers. Like a little puppy caught in the rain. Like some sort of cute little animal in a tough situation, whichever one it takes for you to feel sympathetic towards me.
“So how do you want it?” Natasha asks. This, as they say (and by they I mean people who relish clichés, people like me), was the moment of truth.
“Let’s get rid of it. Cut it to just above the ears.”
Can we examine this statement? I know I’m sending mixed messages here. “Let’s get rid of it” sort of sounds like Harry Truman’s thoughts on Hiroshima in early August 1945. I realize (now) that I may have been signaling to Natasha that I was here on a clearcutting mission.
But my next sentence! “Cut it to just above the ears.” Do Natasha and I share the same basic anatomy? Or did she take this to mean the part of my ear that literally attaches to my thick fucking skull?
She began cutting. I couldn’t see what was going on, so I just smiled. I felt her begin taking hair in big chunks (and this makes sense – if you look at a picture of me you wouldn’t get a sense of how long my hair REALLY was, it’s very curly). Suddenly, though, Natasha took this chunk from the top of my head. I felt wind blowing across portions of my scalp that had never been exposed. I squinted helplessly into the mirror, trying to make sense of the blurry mess looking back at me. I knew something had gone awry, but what?
I trusted Natasha. Last year she gave me a top notch cut. Like the kind you see on Queer Eye. How could I have known that this time I would end up looking like the queer guy? As she kept cutting I knew I was doomed, but what could I say? “Glue that shit back on!” just wouldn’t cut it. I accepted my fate and began trying to imagine how bad it could be. I tried to imagine worst case scenarios, like the Pentagon coming up with casualty numbers from a nuke hit on Manhattan.
I was woefully unprepared.
I will say that I made it halfway home before putting my baseball cap on (the cap carries some irony to it, we’ll get there in a minute). I tried to make the best of it. But the head that stared back at me in reflections from store windows was a monstrosity. Well, moreso than usual.
“It looks like Brad Pitt in Oceans Eleven!” Natasha said (it’s an Oceans Eleven cap, thus bringing the “irony” into play. Yeah, it wasn’t that good, I know.) It sort of looks more like George Clooney, if he was inducted into the army. And was fat and had an unkempt beard.
I have no hair on my head. An informal survey has revealed my hair is one fingernail long. It’s swept forward into some kind of Caesar cut, like what was popular amongst people I hated in 1998. My beard is longer than my hair. I could join the army and they wouldn’t have to give me a trim.
Every time I walk past the mirror in the hallway I get startled. Who is this guy with the big head and the bad hairdo?!? It’ll grow out, but the hours already feel like weeks - how will the weeks feel? There’s probably a math equation in that.
The kicker is that I paid 37 bucks plus tip for this. Frankly, I wish Natasha had just beat the shit out of me, taken two twenties from my wallet and sent me home. Had I been given that choice – the choice between a rotten and sort of gay looking haircut and a vicious beating at the hands of a girl – I would be writing a humorous essay about my shattered clavicle right now.
