(cont.)
156. It’s an all-natural people repellant.
Not only am I a six-foot-six gorilla wearing size sixteen shoes, but also my mohawk is longer than just about anybody’s hair. So, even at my day job where I’ve worked with the public for over a decade, people have become this much more reluctant to approach me. For a time, I even used Knox gelatin to superglue the hawk into great big liberty spikes, the likes of which could turn any old lady’s hair blue. But those days are behind me, behind my shoulders. My mohawk isn’t nearly as noticeable anymore, especially in a ponytail (which is how I tend to keep my hair at work), but I still get a mixed bag of contempt, alarm, and scorn, if not outright avoidance. People suck. And yet, the longer my hair gets, the more people steer clear of me. And I’ll be damned if that’s not a good enough reason in itself. The end.
157. A little something for book cover judgers.
When possible, I like surprising people by being the kindest, most present person they’ve ever met. To be clear, I don’t mean in a fake or pompous sort of way, or that I’m even necessarily interested in being everybody’s friend, but if I’ve learned anything from working in retail, it’s that the world is shorter on kindness and respect than ever—but it doesn’t have to be. So, wherever I am, on the clock or not, I tend to go out of my way to bring a smile to strangers’ faces if they appear to be having a hard time and I feel it’s within my power to do something about it. It’s an amusing irony how unapproachable I appear to be in the wild. And yet, I’m no saint. I’m as guilty as the next guy when it comes to road rage, reflex animosity, and jumping to conclusions from time to time. To name one specific toxic trait of mine, I get a certain satisfaction out of proving bible-thumper types wrong, people who, after one look at me, imagine I really am some kind of wild animal. I enjoy bursting their bubbles. Because, if you can’t respect me as a human on account of something as silly as how I choose to keep my hair, then you can go to hell—you know, that place Christian doctrine says you’ll go to if you, ahem, judge people.
158. Six years is a long, long time.
I haven’t cut my hair since before the Covid lockdown of 2020. Since before the last Tool album. Since before I quit smoking cigarettes. Since, hell, who knows what all at this point. So many important milestones in my life have occurred since I had a proper haircut, formative experiences good, bad, and fugly. This represents one of the biggest time investments I’ve ever known. My hair is longer, even, than my longest relationship with a significant other—which also took place since I last cut my hair. That one really gets me: my hair is longer than the time we spent together, which seems like a long, long time, looking back. It doesn’t seem possible. We’d just met around the time I adopted my mohawk—our lovechild. I can’t help feeling that, if I cut my hair, it’ll really be over.
159. Who cares if my grandpa doesn’t love me?
Not cutting my hair is the perfect excuse for my grandpa to go on not speaking to me. He is ninety years old and has seen everything. And he knows everything; just ask him. However, his grandson sporting long hair has proved to be more than this veil of tears had prepared him for. He hates my hair. I don’t think he hates me, but I don’t think he loves me either. He’s so damn smart and so damn stubborn that he seems not to know how to love anybody. Or maybe it’s just shame at having never solved that equation. Whatever the case, he’s hardly spoken to me in this life, and that’s too bad—but so are his feelings toward my hair and any other judgements in regard to a life he doesn’t even pretend to be a part of. Or to want to. He never has, all along. He makes me so mad I want to yell, to end all of my sentences with prepositions, to call him up and lecture him, to have children of my own after all just so that I might one day become a grandpa myself and actually be one—to counterbalance what he’s done to me and anybody else in the family he’s alienated. I wish he could see the irony of being a “genealogist,” i.e., spending all his time with dead relatives instead of those of us among the living. That is, assuming it’s not just me. Presumably, he at least speaks to his wife, my grandmother—whom I never hear from either. Oh, I get their (read: her) annual Christmas card, but I still can’t decide if one sentence, annually, of Carolyn’s clipped, careful cursive counts as love.
160. Friends don’t let friends cut their hair.
Perhaps the main reason I haven’t cut my hair is that, every time I’ve even considered doing so, my dear friends have talked me out of it. “Friends don’t let friends cut their hair,” Latham once said. That stuck with me. My barber, another good friend and colleague, has cautioned me against cutting it multiple times, outright refusing me the first time I brought it up. He told me to think about it and get back to him in a week, which I did. Of course, by then I had changed my mind. It wasn’t time. I have to want to do it, I’ve since decided. So what if I still don’t want to? With friends like these, who needs haircuts?
161. I never liked having short hair.
I’ve never been too fond of my appearance, period. I’m tall and lanky and have huge feet to go with my huge—nose, which is slightly crooked. I have elf ears and a scar from a cleft lip that healed in utero. My eyesight is awful, so I’ve always worn glasses. I have no ass at all. I can’t grow a beard worth the time it takes to do so, even when I do. It goes without saying, I’ve never been a huge hit with the ladies. I’ve never been a big hit with men, either. I’ve always been a bit of an oddball, a black sheep. To a very real extent, when I began growing out my hair, I took on a new persona. Early on, I experienced a new, previously unknown flattery, including being likened to a young Phil Anselmo. Even now, when I play music with my band, for instance, the long hair just feels right. I might still be the same lurching bigfoot with new and exciting delusions, but, dammit, I like my long hair.
162. Long-haired, freaky people are my kind of people.
In the time I’ve been growing out my hair, I’ve maintained the counterintuitive goal of obtaining better employment. It hasn’t been easy. Probably the two-foot-long mohawk hasn’t helped, but what’s a boy to do? Cut it? As if. I’ve had a couple temporary gigs on top of my day job, contract work mostly, but over the last few years—outright years—of writing cover letters that read better than short stories, not to mention knocking interviews out of the park, I have next to nothing to show for it. Don’t get me wrong, I have a decent job, but at the end of the day it’s not what I want to be doing. And yet, it’s a catch-22: the more applications I fill out stating and restating my own stasis, the less inclined I am to keep answering these same questions, not to mention the depressing, new question rearing its ugly head: Why? Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, why bother? I just don’t know the right people, I guess. Employers can pretend that nepotism doesn’t exist, same as Bigfoot, but here I sit, living proof. Okay, I’m exaggerating. I know I’m just being picky; I accept that. But I’m not trying to take a pay cut. And I’m not looking to trade retail work for the food service industry. I’m not going to talk on the phone (read: get yelled at) for eight hours a day like my roommate does. No, I don’t have my CDL and don’t really care to obtain one. No, I won’t work nights, never again—sorry, not sorry. And no, I’m not the one who knows Jan from accounting. No, I don’t have five-years’ experience doing the very job I’m currently applying for, but I would love to if you’d just give me the chance.
163. Look what happened to Samson.
I’m just saying, what if I cut my hair and cease being such a superhuman dynamo? Would You still love me, God? Asking for a friend. I’m not superstitious, but I do make sure to put on my left shoe first (it must be the left, I don’t know why; I’ll take the right one off and start over if I have to), I always wear a rubber band on my left wrist for good luck, and I close my eyes before turning off light switches at night—to name a few of my conscious quirks. If I deviate from these matters, my life or luck or something or another suffers (or I tell myself it does, which amounts to the same thing. Thanks, brain). Given enough time, I can and will convince myself of anything. I used to believe, for example, that if I quit smoking cigarettes I wouldn’t be able to write anymore. It took a very long time to see this for the fiction that it was, another unscrupulous lie told by an addiction to hostage addicts like myself back then. I did experience creative drought following quitting, but, having expected to, I took it easy on myself and wrote only in short bursts while telling myself I could stop the second I felt those wicked, wheedling cravings. These days I almost never want a cigarette. Even now, I can think about it, talk about it, and write about it without so much as a thought of actually having one. And so I know: if I can quit smoking, I can do anything.
164. Because Anarchy, that’s why.
I know it’s not very punk rock of me, but lately I’ve begun contemplating cutting my hair. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not yet ready to pull the trigger, but I am now aware that it will undoubtedly happen one of these days. I’m also aware that it won’t be the end of the world when I do decide to cut it. Whatever the case, I’m not going to do it to get a job or to impress anybody or even because the front got damaged recently and the upkeep has become annoying; I’ll cut it when I want to cut it and for no other reason than that I want to. The thing is, I think part of having a mohawk, at least at first, had to do with some vague idea of sticking it to the Man. However, one thing I’ve discovered during this adventure into my thirties is that the Man is indifferent in the face of my acting out. Furthermore, if I began this journey at a place of rebelling against forces in this world I didn’t or don’t agree with, that simply isn’t where I am now. Not that those forces have become any more agreeable. Malice doesn’t age well. It’s coming to terms with my own darkness, I guess, growing up, growing older. I’m a different person than the young man I was this much hair ago.
165. I’m a shameless procrastinator.
I started working on this essay a year or so ago as a joke (which is more or less how all my silly little projects come about), but it always got pushed to the backburner in favor of who knows what other nonsense I was working on at the time. As writers (and humans) we must trust that new ideas will return to us in full bloom when we’re better equipped to receive them, but doing so requires a level of faith I’ve never possessed. I’ve always lacked confidence in myself, for one thing. For years I labored under the assumption that, when inspired enough to do so, I had to write a project then and there, on the spot, and as soon as possible, as if the magic was set to evaporate at any moment. I think it was Stephen King’s On Writing that first turned me on to the pros (pun intended) of setting a draft aside long enough to forget about it, to give myself space from it, before editing. What a liberating idea! I don’t think I needed the King, specifically, to tell me this, but I’m glad somebody did. Somehow, it took the pressure off, though I never understood why. I see now that I simply lacked faith in myselfas a writer (and human) to look away and not lose sight of the magic. I must trust myself. We must trust ourselves, Dear Reader.
166. There is reason in the roasting of eggs.
It occurs to me now how trivial our reasons for most things tend to be. Perhaps the main reason I haven’t cut my hair in so long is that it would require making a decision to do something and then, I don’t know, actually doing it. Where has my follow-through gone? I can’t even finish a sandwich. Starting now, starting with finishing this essay, I’m going to make things happen instead of waiting for them to as if the Universe owes me one. (Speaking of liberating ideas!) As for cutting my hair or not, who cares? I’ll do it when the time is right, and I’ll know when that is. And even when I do decide to cut it, it will grow back, my barber assures me. He tells me I have the most resilient hair he’s ever seen, so I should go with my gut. And I am. As if I needed another reason.
