The Dolphin Coiffure

There isn't anything complicated about my hair. It's straight. You can describe it in linear units and you've pretty much got the picture. It's been everything from an inch long to three feet long, and gravity writes the rest of the story. Don't look for the strands to show any initiative or imagination. It's all just going to hang there to whatever point it's whacked off.

This means it's not much help to put in layers so as to give the illusion that I have a normal-shaped head. Most people's heads are round in the back to accommodate the standard Homo sapiens operating system, but my head is just flat. It's the size of an ambitious walnut. You cut layers into my hair in the back, they all hang straight. Layer cuts give me all the volume dolphin skin gives a dolphin.

This worked out very well for me at age thirteen when I had long straight hair that didn't even need ironing, not that I didn't iron it once or twice. Classmates who soldiered through fitful nights with their hair on soup cans would have killed for my hair, and that was my stock, because until the tits grew in I had nothing else to bank on.

And I've never been able to decide what linear dimension my hair should be. The last time it was real long and I cut it off, I thought it needed to be to my shoulders at least so that I could hide my pudding neck. But that doesn't work. My pudding neck considers itself a Feature and is somehow aware I'm never going to threaten it with surgery, so it just flops out there, shameless. Doesn't matter what angle you take the picture, my pudding neck photo-bombs my head.

Then I sheared my hair off to a nice stand-up crewcut in case that would volumize my head but that required Product and attention, and even then it was still flat in back. So I let it grow out and hoped at some point I'd know when to say "When."

And I have! My trusty barber has managed to take the limp shower-curtain look out of my head and it got to just exactly the right length and now I have a Look. Wrap a scarf around the pudding and I'm good to go.I went back today for a trim and asked her if she could cut it without making it shorter. English isn't her first language so she did not have a large bullshit lexicon to draw from. She just said "No."

Okay, cut it anyway, I said.

The fact is I would get my hair cut every week if I could. I would pay someone to just fiddle with my hair. Every follicle is attached to its own happiness nerve. Throw in a little electric-razor action at the nape and a light touch in the ear region and I will follow you home and roll over for a belly-rub. I still remember the feeling when Pastor Lange put his hand on my head during my confirmation as a genuine Lutheran. (They try to confirm you when you're still the age to be weirded out by Death and Eternity but before you get to the point where you're thinking, Now, hold on just a minute. What is that you want me to believe?) When the good pastor floated his palm over my hair, I would have told him I bought the whole story.

This is how I survived babysitting. I am not a natural babysitter. But girls of a certain age will happily play with long hair for hours as though you are their personal giant Barbie. And I will let them. I will even consider forgoing the 50 cents an hour, but think better of it later.

I'm sure I was meant to have my head patted. I was wired that way. And it's no trouble for anyone. This is why God made me short. I think that's what Pastor Lange was trying to convey.

The Lock Of Love Is In My Eyes

Horrible story. Sixty-eight-year-old lady, name of Lee Redmond, was in a terrible high-speed accident and was thrown clear of her SUV. Tragedy ensued. She broke her fingernails.

She was a world-record holder; each nail was nearly a yard long. In the pictures, she looked like a neatly coiffed giant sloth. There's an interview with her on the web, right next to an ad for fingernail polish, although I think someone missed a bet by not advertising one of those Japanese toilets that do everything but read you the paper.

Because if you look at the pictures of her "before," it's hard not to immediately come up with some everyday tasks that would be just about impossible with those giant claws. That's right--there's no way she's ever going to be able to pull off those arpeggios in the Chopin C-minor Etude. In fact, the entire enterprise of nail-growing seems like a pain in the ass. Nevertheless, although she admits that life after the accident got a lot easier in many ways, she was never tempted, in thirty years, to do away with them. These sorts of ventures get a life of their own, becoming their own justification. I think of it as the Vietnam Escalation syndrome. If you've already lost twenty-eight thousand "boys" over there, the case could be made that it's time to wrap things up and bring everybody home. But that's not the way people reason. If we don't sacrifice twenty-eight thousand more, the first batch will have died in vain. Same exact thing with fingernails. You're thirty years into the thing, you're not going to stop no matter what.

I know how she and Lyndon Johnson felt. I can't cut my hair off. My hair is totally annoying to me, but I've got too much time invested in it. I could cut it off and give the strands to the Locks of Love to be made into wigs for bald children. For that matter, Locks of Love could probably do fine work with one or two weeks' floor sweepings. My hair is all over the place. It's on the floor, it's on the carpet, it's turning into felt in the folds of my recliner. It clumps up and bounds across the bathroom floor like tumbleweeds.

The vacuum cleaner is gagging, and wants to know if John Deere makes anything for the home-appliance market that could roll the stuff into bales. Rogue strands sail silently through the air looking for casseroles to hole up in. The drain in the shower has begun to make that same sustained horking sound that usually precedes the cat getting punted off the bed. The native dust bunny population, cowering under the furniture, is in danger of being overrun.

Some strands never even quite make it off the mainland. I routinely extract hair out of crevices on myself that they didn't originate in, and that I wasn't planning to floss anytime soon. These are likely to be a deal-breaker for Locks of Love.

I know I'll be happier just as soon as I whack it off into the thin, sensible old-lady Prince Valiant bob it wants to be. But unless I have a serious mishap with my bicycle and a nearby weed whacker, I may never get around to it.