Hair Wars

Several years ago, when I was in my mid twenties, I found a single, silvery white hair glowing among the diminishing glory of my chestnut brown locks.  My hair has never recovered from the attack on its self-esteem from a guest barber who cut my hair before a wedding when I was about 23.  ”Would you like to try some Rogaine?” he asked, assuming the same sort of familiarity I had with Robert, the man who had been cutting my hair for five years and whose absence was now responsible for this mess.  ”Would you like me to cut off your pecker and feed it to the iguanas at the PetMart next door?” I wanted to reply.  Since that day, my hair has lost the will to repopulate on its own; this stranger’s comments insulting my hair like a beautiful woman at a party asking me if I shouldn’t give up on sex and just refer my dates to a sperm bank instead.  So the appearance of this one, graceful, confident white hair so many years ago was a shock.  Could it be that my bruised hair should be replaced by a more confident, mature, even sexy set of salt and pepper strands?  Could this balding be stopped before it really even starts?   No.  That one grey hair was a scout.  A lone ant of a hair doing reconnaissance on my head, collecting information on whether the picnic was going to stick around for a while and looking for signs of rain.  Little did I know that it would take several years before it would return with its friends.  They plotted and planned for my 30th birthday, when I would be too worried about the little hairs on the sides of my ears, the medium length hairs that have slowly migrated from the back corners of my block cut to the borderline where my t-shirt meets my neck, the wild unruly two toned hairs that scream out in all directions from my eyebrows, and the little curly black bastards that poke out from the tip of my nostrils. However, none of these new hairs in new places bother me as much as the black hairs.  These are new hairs in old places.  They are thick; Kirstie Alley thick.  They are black; Michelle Obama black.  And they are long.  Boogie Nights long.  They do not seem to have any real roots, they are stubborn as fuck, and they show up on my face and on my head.  They are fond of being ingrown as well.  However, I’m not sure what to do about plucking them.  When you’re losing your hair, every one counts.  That’s why the white ones get to stay.  But the white ones cooperate, they are essentially the same as the brown ones, maybe even better (I haven’t lost a white hair yet, at least they’re loyal!).Could it be that the black hairs are the pepper?  I just assumed all the white and grey hairs would inherently have some kind of gradient to them, making me eventually look just like George Clooney.  But now I think that as the accelerated pace of evolution on my head sends my non-reproductive brown hair the way of the dodo, I will be left with two warring factions of hair on my head.  The graceful silver hairs, and the principled, stubborn dark ones.  My head has become a follicle produced diorama of the conflict in the Middle East.  Next time I visit my barber, he might ask me, “Would you like to send your hair to Annapolis to talk to Condoleza Rice?”  Screw you.  Just don’t forget to shave my back.

 

~ by admin on March 9, 2008.