Tag Archives: haircut

News

Hair Scare

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I don’t go hatless near playgrounds anymore because I don’t want to upset the children.

There’s this recurring nightmare where I do exactly that and a terrified boy spots me. He instinctively reaches up to touch the hair on the top of his head to reassure himself that it is still there. He’s relieved to find that it is, but his eyes continue to drill me, because in my style he sees the death of all his dreams.

Any modern boy would be perfectly justified in doing this because parents in Georgia are using my haircut to shame their sons.

There are at least five elements at play in this “trend”, if it can be called that.

  1. Children misbehave
  2. Acceptable methods of discipline are in short supply
  3. Many men, as they age, lose hair
  4. Men try to hang on to as much hair as possible
  5. No child wants to look like one of these men

The inevitable result is the haircut punishment – trimming a ten year old’s mane to make him look like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, or me.
As someone who came by this hairstyle naturally, I’m alarmed that my “look” is considered so toxic and undesirable that free spirited children will curb their own of self-expression to avoid it. What does that say about me? That I have, in my later years, turned into a monster, of course. My fate is something to be avoided at all costs. For people in any age group, worry about “what will they think of me” is a powerful lever to change behavior. But at this point in my life I thought I could be a positive role model. Instead, I’m being used as a a bludgeon.

Behave, or it’s this!

A word of advice to the kids: If you think following the rules will guarantee you a full head of hair forever, you should reconsider. I behaved and wound up like this anyway, so you’re not completely out of the woods.

And to all the barbers out there – I know at one time barbers were also surgeons and there was a lot of blood involved. As you might imagine, that association made people hesitant to sit for a simple haircut. Now that those days are gone, do you really want to equate the barber shop with punishment? Sure, it may bering in some business today, but when those children grow up, they will have a built-in haircut/humiliation association.

Do you really want that?

Share your worst haircut experience.

Poems

Hair Scare

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For a brief time yesterday the parade of horribles that makes up the world’s news was interrupted by the delightfully wacky story that all North Korean men have been ordered to get the same haircut as the Hermit Kingdom’s leader, Kim Jong-un.

The BBC, which broke the story in the western media, walked it back a few hours later by amending the headline to limit the Hair Dictum to male students, rather than all men.

It remained a nice frolic for feature writers though, because anything involving the suppression of young people is irresistible eyeball candy for the oldsters who follow news headlines all afternoon.

But sourpuss editors who do not want a good time to last too long subjected the story to some journalistic analysis and concluded this entire totalitarian trim tale was probably a hoax, because real North Korean men who have been seen out walking around in broad daylight recently are not sporting Kim Jong-un’s side-buzzed, floppy-topped do.

What a pity. I had already commissioned an ode to Kim Jong-un’s Hair Order from Trail Baboon Poet Laureate Schuyler Tyler Wyler, who is only capable of crafting juvenile sing-song verses.

And once STW begins a project, he cannot stop until he’s done.

I sat down in my barber’s chair
for one more monthly shearing,
For years Bob cut my thinning hair,
a gradually growing clearing.

“I’ll take the usual,” said I,
“the way I always do.”
“The usual?” he said. “But why?”
“The usual’s not you.”

“For I can cut it how you like.
My stylings are the smartest.”
I said “If you can make it spike,
I’ll know you are an artist.”

“A spike,” said he. “I’m on the job.
Your spike will be sublime.”
“If that won’t work,” I told him, “Bob,
the usual’s just fine.”

He spoke at length to every strand,
he clipped and combed and pasted,
Caressed each follicle by hand.
No single hair was wasted.

But as completion quickly neared
Bob’s face slumped in a frown.
The spike that he had engineered
stood briefly, then fell down.

“That’s fine,” I said, “A noble fight.
The challenge was too tough.
It won’t take long to make it right.
The usual’s enough.”

It only took a little while
A peaceful, quiet respite
But when I saw my newest style
I looked just like a despot.

Hair was collected in a clump
Like a racer’s in the luge is.
As if a wild bear took a dump
on Moe of the Three Stooges.

I looked at Bob. His face was cool.
I said, “This is deranged.
I asked you for ‘the usual.'”
“That’s it,” he said. “It’s changed.”

“That spike was never meant to be.
‘Twas preordained to flop.
All hairstyles now, are, by decree,
dictated from the top.”

What’s ‘the usual’ for you?