Hair Today

Some Danish gloomy Gus named Hamlet once deigned to lament: "How all occasions do inform against me." Well, I've never seen a ghost, so I guess I'm a wee bit more optimistic than Ham, but for the last hour, I swear, it does seem like all occasions are informing for me. You see, it's Friday, the end of my seventh week of blogging every day, and I thought I was a little tapped out for ideas. So I scanned the paper, looking for inspiration, and certainly the whole balloon boy shenanigans is potential grist for the mill, but somehow I felt I'd reached my limit on hot air for one week. So finally I turned to the horoscopes, and lo and behold, the advice proffered me for tonight was this: "Let your hair down." Now I've still got hair left, but there isn't enough to let down, so that anyone would notice, and besides, I was kind of thinking of actually getting my hair up for tonight. I was going to dig out the old pomade, shape a nice, middle-aged balding guy spiky pseudo Mohawk and go stand on a corner somewhere munching bacon, covered in chocolate! and mocking passersby with what I had and they had not, namely a Mohawk and bacon, covered in chocolate!.

So I started thinking, Hair, yeah, that's today's subject. I thought of a long ("hairy" as the mighty, late great Joe Gaul would have said, meaning something like awesome, humongous, gnarly) poem about hair, inspired by Dr. Seuss no doubt, I had written a couple years ago, posting which might enable me to figure out the "Jump" function on this blogger thing. Sounded like a plan.

So I get on the computer, check my e-mail first, looking for all the notes from people telling me to expect a rushed-package delivery of Malley's bacon, covered in chocolate!. Well, those missives must have gotten lost in the mail because the only e-mail I had newly received was in my Junk file, and the subject, I swear to Samson, was this: "Get Your Hair Back in Just Weeks‏." Right about then the hair on my neck that hasn't gone anywhere, started to rise. Spooky, no? Next stop YouTube, where I naturally go looking for a pertinent clip (!) from that dreadful movie version of Hair. I'm watching some scene with a young Treat Williams (what happened to him? can he get his career back in just weeks?) struggling in the Army when the drill sergeant starts calling out names, and what do I hear, or at least think I hear (it could be Brook, but I don't think so)? The badass sarge call out the name "Rourke!"
Now I'm freaked out, ready to shave my head, give away the bacon, covered in chocolate!, and go recite Hamlet soliloquies until I either win a lifetime achievement award from the Obies, or mad crowds of people rip all the hairs off my neck. So, as usual, when in doubt, I turned to Elvis, or, more precisely, Elvii.

So watch the Hair clip and listen for what sounds like "Rourke!" Watch Elvis get his Army induction haircut. Listen to the other Elvis croon about "the girl who used to have it and the girl who still has." And if you feel like reading my hairy hair poem, click the read more button after the videos, or if the jump thing doesn't work, just read the poem there, I guess.

As for me, I'm buttoning up my hair and staying off the Internet tonight.

Oh gross, there's a hair in my bacon, covered in chocolate!

Elvis Costello-Baby's Got A Brand New Hairdo






Nitpicking My Locks


There’s a hair there
Just a lone lock
A wisp of a hair merely
Barely there
A whisker really
Proboscis protruding
Intruding nobody’s view
Not even mine.
I feel it not see it,
But I can’t leave it
Let it be.
You see it scares me:
What does it know
Poking from the side of my nose
Like that?
What does it mean
That lean sideways stubble?
Interior trouble?
Something trying to get out,
Out from my snout,
My most animal-like sense organ?
Holy hirsute, though,
This hairy grooming
Is looming too meticulous
Too ironically ridiculous.

It started twenty-two years ago
Half my life ago:
Mirror-peering
At head hair disappearing
Conceding the receding,
Loss of locks
Bald going
Forehead growing
Wondering, fearing
A pale fleshy pate
Not late
Like in my eighties
When the ladies won’t care
But something near
Like thirty oh dirty fate
Or even dare I say it
Twenty-seven
Or man alive
Twenty-five
Oh heaven how can I hide it
Disguise it?
Brush it there
Comb it here
Damn it all, this ain’t fun
I shouted in my duress
I’m going bald
At all of twenty-one.
But time moves on, I guessed,
Like so much water down the drain
Well, not really down,
Pooled rather, dammed, stopped up
By all that fallen hair.
It’s not fair!
Just a year or two before
I had abhorred
My thick tresses
Unruly gnarly
Hardly kempt
The source of much
Adolescent embarrassment.
Then I couldn’t keep it combed
Now I can’t keep it home.
I’d stomp and stew
Rage and complain
At such a tender age
Reading all about Rogaine.
But then the unimaginable
I still can’t explain
That recession of hairs
Went into remission for years:
I’m no balder now
At the age of forty-three
Then I was ten years ago
At thirty-three.
Oh, but thirty-three
What misery
Involuntarily
Losing other hair
Not up there
But hair more manly.
No, not there,
Somewhere in between
Though rarely seen.
You see after an anxiety attack,
Panicky heart scare,
I stood wracked
Hospital gown undraped
Wheeled down from intensive care
Stood there agape
When so unceremoniously
But hardly parsimoniously
That orderly so barbarically
So nonchalantly
Wielding a disposable Bic
—or was it a Shick?—
Raped the locks of my chest
Lickety split
From one breast down diagonally
To my belly
Then up to my other man tit
And before I knew
That I could even stand it
Down again
Carving a swathed smooth V
Out of my once hairy manly chest
All for some test
That months later
Appeared on some billing statement
Costing four hundred dollars:
A buck a shorn hair
Is my estimate.

Oh, Kuhnie
You never warned me
That such humiliation might swarm me.
Bob Kuhn, Kuhnie,
Old codge happy grouch
Twisted elbow golfer
Offering me,
Teen boy caddy,
A pinch or five
More or less
Of slimy Mail Pouch chaw
To stuff in my jaw.
“It’ll put hair on your chest,”
Kuhnie grinned and spat
And what the hell
“I could use some of that,”
My voice cracked
And forgive me mother
I tried my best
But I succumbed, sinned
And opened wide
And loaded the awful
If not unlawful
Leafy gooey gook inside
And who would’ve guessed
But before I knew it
After spit upon spit upon spit
In addition to a stray zit or three
I sprouted a rufous hair or two proudly
On my breast,
“A chest finally manly”
I danced shirtless in glee
“Dan the Man Macho”
Thanks to Mail Pouch oh
Though little did I know then
At the dawn of manhood
The fickle comings and goings of hair
That would
Without reason, though apparently
Not without rhyme
Plague me and pester me
Time and again, again and again.
It’s enough to make me
Pull my hair out
Though not, no doubt,
From out of my head.
The balding may have slowed
But it hasn’t stopped
Thinning up there.
Instead the hairs I now pluck
Are not winning
Flowing glowing rusty locks
But, just my luck,
Wiry wisps I wholly oppose.
From where you wonder
Well I’ll tell you the wheres:
From inside my nose
And out of my ears.
Oh dear, I hear you say
Oh yuck, I hear you pray
Please don’t delineate for us
Don’t horror us
Don’t make us hostile
By foisting on us
Your attempts
To exfoliate the brush
From an orifice as horrible as
Your left and right ear
And each capacious nostril,
You’ll cause us
To be nauseous
If you digress
To a tress by tress account
Of such heinous hair removal.

Okay, in light of such reproval
I’ll merely mention
The tyranny of unwanted hair proliferation
The irony of yanking out more hair weekly
From my nose and ears
Than weakly grow on my head
In more than two years.
What aggravation!
Oh such sufferation!
And if the back aches, kidney stones
Nighttime pee breaks and creaky bones
Aren’t enough to fill me
With the stuff of mortality intimations
I now add to my lamentations
The ritual deforestations
Of my ears and my schnoz
Fully cognizant
That each useless vibrisa
Voided and hauled away
Represents one more day
Done gone in this not so long anymore
Trek to some other shore,
Though surely before
I reach those distant placid banks
Some procedure or other, no thanks,
Will shear my crotch
Or some New Year will turn
With a new splotch of hair
Here or there
On some previously smooth
Body land mass
Like my knuckles or my ass.

But why complain
Why split hairs
Over the psychic pain
Of getting old
Why wear that hairshirt so bold
Why submit to the malaise
Of a bad hair daze?
It’s a bushy tale too often told
Here today, gone tomorrow
Hair today, bald tomorrow
Baby-butted today, furry tomorrow
Why worry such sorrow
Into our heads
Whether they be curly or shaved
Pig-tailed or covered with dreads?
Hair
There or
Nowhere
Who should care?

And yet. And yet,
I can’t end now
`Cause I can’t comprehend nohow
That one insistent hair
Resistent, without fear
That appears without fail
Despite my persistence
To dispose
That blooms from the side of my nose
Again and again.
What rough beast of my subconscious is it
That slouches consistent
From smack dab in the middle of my face
To at least be recognized
Dealt with, pondered?
I pluck it from my nose
To spite whatever,
Which I cannot trace.

I admit I—
Fashion unconscious
Stylishly retarded
GQ-less I—
Have been tempted to
Permit the dogged thing to grow out,
To cultivate a one-strand
Whiskey-colored honker beard
To flow forth from my nose
Down to my toes.
Set a Guinness record
If not a trend.
But as of yet
I defer to convention
And weed out the sole stubborn stubble
Long before any five o’clock shadow gathers.

But what if?
What if I abandon
Tending to and contending with
And lamenting the ebbs and flows
Of all my other normal hairs
And turn all my attendant cares
To this one spliff
This one unique unsightly flair hair;
Condition it
Pamper it
Primp it?
Be hair now
Could I dare to?
Would you then
Dare to say
I am not the happy genius
Of what goes on
In around and outside
Of my own head?
Should we find out?