Stupid Hair

I often hear people talk about having a “bad hair day.” This is a social indicator of individual displeasure at not looking as good as you did, say, the night before when everyone was looking at you through beer goggles. At least as good as you thought you looked. The sad admission that, no matter how hard you tried, your physical self was intent on not living up to your mental expectation, or at least desire, of how it should be best presented to an unsuspecting public.

“I’m having a bad hair day” has entered our cliché lexicon and very pleased we are with it.

I doubt that I have ever had a good hair day. Ever. You see, I have stupid hair. This is no reflection on its intellect (as most hair would be hard pressed to even register on the SATs), just my acknowledged exasperation at having hair with a mind of its own. Regardless of my desire or best efforts, my hair does just as it chooses, consistently in direct contravention to my own wishes for it. It’s an amazing thing to see. Amusing. Fairly goofy-looking with no assistance, when my hair enters the picture I am destined to the ignominy of total goofydom.

An apt representation of what lives beneath its wild and unpredictable depths, it shoots out all directions at once, is multi-colored (though this year has seen much of that leave) and most of it insanely curly, with the odd straight ones just to make sure we all know who’s in charge. No amount of grease or unguent can contain its unruly design: short, it defines piles of curls that all have different places to go at the same time; long, I can bind it, but it either compresses into a single homogeneous swirl of hair, with lots of delightful stragglers tickling my face and ears and pretty much just floating around halo-like, or becomes a huge poof, a Brillo pad of fuzz attached to the back of my neck with a frenzy of flying facial follicles.

As I become an oldling, it has taken on migratory patterns displeasing to the split-end user, deserting the top of my head, making my face a huge spotty bean, and reappearing on my back. I’m concerned this progression could leave me entirely bald with a nice furry tail. I suppose a tail would at least offer some compensatory value to chrome-domery but I prefer my hair atop Mount C Rage where it belongs, not fleeing in shame out the back way.

Then to make it worse, it’s taken to growing out my ears. What is that shit? Why do I need hairy ears? I’m not a fucking Hobbit or some barnyard buddy. It’s hard enough for me to hear as it is without my ears going for a look. I’ve never seen ears with a nice style job, they just look fuzzy and odd. And to add a little slap, my mustache is growing up my nose. It was always a separate entity from my nose hairs; they were neighbors, got along fine.

Perhaps too fine as they now appear to be cohabitating. I am at a loss to define the evolutionary value of hairy ears and nostrils, but aesthetically they are irritating nonsense.

Some would suggest the completely shaved head as a means of coping. This is a thoroughly unsatisfactory solution. At its very root it signals surrender, a pyrrhic victory to remove an offender that was leaving on its own…Slowly…But in that I would have to face an even grimmer reality: I would look impossibly goofy with no hair. My head is oddly shaped and were it exposed in its entirety, I would likely be relegated to sideshow status, which would at least accord me steady employment and an audience.

But of course, the main issue is the shaving. I hate shaving my face and it’s right there in front of me. My head goes all the way around the back, to regions I rarely view and can see only with considerable difficultly. There seems an inherent danger in thrashing around the back of one’s head with a plastic machete. And once back there, where does one stop clear cutting with the back forest in full bloom? It goes on and on… Shaving my head wouldn’t reduce my GQ (Goofiness Quotient) and would require even more maintenance, with blades of varying degrees of sharpness. This is not an option.

My head hair fleeing down my back, my face hair being completely ridiculous and inappropriate, I seem to be in the midst of some kind of insurgency of attrition by militant hairrorists, though I’m disinclined to wage a count hair revolution. Guess I’ve always had a soft spot for kinky rebels. What little of my hair that still remains covers it nicely…

© simmbiosis 10/6/14