Hairpiece

It's not often that epiphanies strike me while I'm in the midst of washing my hair but that's exactly what happened this morning.

See, I have what I like to call 'Merican hair.  In other words, I have dirty blonde (or dishwater blonde, whatever), straight, fine hair.  The kind of hair that women bleach, dye, curl, perm, highlight, streak, and style.  The kind that men resign themselves to the necessity of sporting either the Picard or the Kojak by the age of 40.  You know, plain, regular, hair.

Back in the day, somewhere in Jr. High or maybe my freshman year, I remember reading a piece on how to go from short to long hair or vice versa in a couple of years.  It may have been in Circus or Parade or Spin or some other music magazine.  I don't really remember and it's not important.  What is relevant is that this article showed one of the staff writers with eight different haircuts over the course of two years.  He went from very long, to kinda long, to shaggy, to styled, to short, to mohawk, to buzz cut, to shaved head.  So I started doing that in reverse.

Only I skipped the mohawk bit except for one time during the World Cup but I don't want to talk about that.

I started shaving my head and just letting it grow out, with one or two trims per year to give it a bit of direction and then left it long for as long (ba dump bump) as I could stand it, then out come the clippers and the process starts over.  It looks somewhat thuggish in the beginning and kind of shifty at the end, but in the middle, for a couple of months, it looks fairly respectable.  Hell, I even comb it for those few months.

And so in the shower this morning I realized that that is the perfect metaphor for how I live my life.  I'm too lazy to put in the work needed to maintain any one style for any significant length of time.  So I take the easy route, even knowing that it doesn't look that great and will earn me no respect.

Of course, now that I've realized this, I have no idea what to do about it.  Maybe it's time for a mohawk.