medusa ode

give me head with hair -
long beautiful hair

Our culture has a peculiar fixation on hair.

How we wear our collective hair is trended by the up and comers, those trailblazing follicled fools, whether they be the Fab Four, Kid, Play, Jennifer Aniston, or that Bieber boy. Flip through old pictures or magazines, and immediately the heads act as a date stamp. Without fail, unkempt hair is uncouth and faux-pas, unless you're Robert Smith, Tim Burton, trial VJ Jessie, or post-jizz Mary. Bald is beautiful when it's not busy being sad or pitiful. Tell us culture at large, whether our sisters and wives be shaved, shaped, or merely maintained.

Skip the shower, bypass the shave, put away those tools of torture, says one set of multi-generational pseudo-political motivations. One era is replete with baby-faced fellas and another finds beards galore. I have heard it said that in an economic downturn, the beards grow in counter-balance. However, living in a town with so many indie kids buying their holed ball busting denim and manicured personalities at retail, those beards just become an ironic addition.

The carbon copy look is quickly called personal expression. Show me a tattoo and I'll show you a parlor offering BOGO to get the preachers and extreme couponers through the frosted front doors. Piercings, tattoos, weird and wild hair are all passé. There's no rebellion, no revolt anymore. People don't express anything new in these means. Now it's all become passive aggressive tendencies on social networks.


But it's so deeply wired in us. Our hair defines our day. We scapegoat our mess of tousled and tinted protein when we're having a bad one, when that job bypasses our grasp, or our date leaves before breakfast. It's fucked up! What about the other ninety-seven percent of us? Why does that hold less sway once we've been shafted due to our skull covering?

Hair holds an intense power within us, our identity. It is one of the key things that continues to grow when we've all but quit. I remember feeling a great weight off my shoulders when I dropped those twelve (or so) inches. I went from striking resemblance to Jesus to blending into the background. It's not an accident that so many films have a transitional scene wherein characters are shedding or shaving, as if that whittling allows our souls to breathe.

Finding your look is culturally important. I have rarely known mine. I have often felt that I had more to say separate how I looked. I have never been known to spend much time on that part of me. Making the decision to finally grow a beard out, after years of letting it fester in various phases of forgot to shave echoed through my psyche in infinitesimal ways, for example.

I ventured out for a haircut on Friday. Choosing someone to do that can be daunting, since there's an amazing amount of trust that needs to be exhibited from one side and a veritable quantity of skill and confidence that needs to come from the other. I used to have my former sister-in-law cut my hair. She was mean talented with that sort of thing. It was her art.

Friday afternoon I found myself in the chair of a Southern fried woman who kept breathing out Darth Vader on the exhale and couldn't find more than two or three lines of conversation. I could feel the tension in her body and movements. She kept fiddling with my nerves. And I kept hoping she wouldn't rape my head. Getting a haircut is one of those errands that you can't do half-heartedly. You can't exactly go in and start getting snipped then storm out on your check. It's a commitment. As luck would have it, the weirdo behind the scissors actually left me looking sharp.

And I suspect I am better for it.