Almost Cut My Hair

Happened just the other day…Doesn’t it seem like the majority of rock stars have been lucky enough to keep their hair? It’s like some weird, genetic, predisposition.  Sure, there are plenty of exceptions but it’s almost uncanny how many of these older rock guys still have their hair.  Curse them!

I loved the long hair that I had in my younger days but alas, I was not a rock star, and therefore watched it slowly disappear, like some exotic species faced with the inevitable fact of extinction.  Sometimes, when I’m alone in the house, I’ll crank up some Zeppelin and play some air guitar while shaking my head back and forth, whipping around my imaginary long locks.

Why all this ruminating on my follicly challenged head?  The lovely Missus was shaving my head for me recently and it brought back a funny memory.  Soon after my divorce, about ten years ago, I had moved into an apartment in a fun part of town.  It was actually the upper half of a semi-rundown house.  In addition to being follicly challenged, I was also rather challenged, monetarily.  Hell, I was just challenged, all around.  Divorce will do that to you.  Because of this, I was always looking for ways to lower my costs.  I decided that I would buy an electric shaver and start shaving my head myself, rather than going to Supercuts or wherever, and paying $15 for a service that literally took them three minutes or less to perform.  Sounds like a relatively reasonable move, doesn’t it?

Yeah, not so much.  It really hadn’t occurred to me how hard it would be to try to shave the back of my own head.  What can I say?  I had a lot on my mind at the time and clearly had not thought this through all the way.  I plugged the sucker in and was half way through the task when it really hit me how hard it would be to do this myself.  Luckily, the boys were with me that day so I asked number one son, who was all of eleven at that point, to come give me a hand.  I showed him how to do it and off he went, shaving the back of my head.  I felt good!  I had just saved $15 and in another month, the shaver will have paid for itself.

Now would probably be a good time to mention that I’m a guy.  I did not then, nor have I ever, owned a mirror.  Sure, there was a mirror over the sink in the bathroom but I didn’t have a second, hand mirror.  I never thought anything more of it.  I went about my day.  The kids and I hung out and did our thing the next day too.  Then I went to work on Monday and I’ll never forget this.  Sometime during the day, our receptionist Debby pulled me aside.  “I don’t know how to tell you this”, she said, “but whoever cut your hair botched it pretty badly”.  There were apparently clumps of uneven hair on the back of my head and either no one noticed until then or noticed but just didn’t bother to tell me.  That’s what I get for trusting my eleven year old boy with a grooming task!

I had to go to Supercuts after all to get it fixed.  Early on in my relationship with the lovely Missus, she became my barber.  I was determined to save money on haircuts! And this has become a funny family story ever since.

Many good, hair related choices to go with here.  CSNY, Zep, The Hair sountrack, etc.  I’m going off of the beaten path though, with the awesome psych-folk of Devendra Banhart.  Love this guy.