Hey Barber, How About Giving Me A Bieber?

It's official, today at the bookstore, as I hauled out another batch of new magazines, I came to the conclusion that teen singing sensation/heartthrob Justin Bieber is the new bane of my workaday existence. For what seems like an eternity, hair magazines have been that professional bane, but today, with no new hair magazines to put out, but two new Bieber mags, the scales have been tipped. Let me explain.

Until I got mixed up in the day-to-day vagaries of the magazine world, I didn't really know hair magazines existed. Yes, for those who are blind, deaf, and dumb like I was, there are actually magazineS that contain nothing but pictures of women's hairstyles. And they're not some weird fetish magazines (though the one guy with yellow Crocs and the automatically tinting bi-focals might beg to differ). They're simply magazines for women looking to find a new hairstyle. That's it. Imagine the editorial staff meetings at those magazines: what's the big question every month--um, 325 pictures of women with different hairstyles, or 340? What do we put on the cover this month? Uh, how about a woman with a cool hairstyle? Sounds good to me, Roger, anybody gotta better idea? No? Consider it done, then.

Now why should I despise these magazines, you ask? Well, nobody buys them, they just look at them, constantly. So the mags never go away, but they're always out of place--all over the store, not in their correct section, etc. And there aren't really regular issues of a given hair magazine; no Hair Monthly, really. Just a bunch of "special" issues that come out all the time, so dealing with them isn't as simple as dumping the new issues on the rack and yanking the old ones. And they're also the types of magazines that rarely have that nice little fine print message, "Retailer, Please Display Until June 9, 2010"--maybe a bothersome piece of copy cluttering the cover of your favorite magazine, but for those of us in the biz, a damn necessity. So I've got all these magazines whose titles and covers all look alike, I'm constantly having to re-shelve them and re-organize their little nook in the rack, and they rarely go "off-sale" unless I simply say, I've had enough of this chick in this blond 'do, she's gone.

But now the Bieb has arrived. And arrived and arrived and arrived. Every day he shows up on the cover of at least two magazines, I swear. I want somebody to do a count: I don't know what it will say about the state of America, but I'm willing to bet that Justin Bieber will appear on the cover of more magazines in the calendar year of February 2010-January 2011, than Obama did from February 2008-January 2009--no mean feat.

And maybe the cute Canadian lad with the easy smile and ever-engaging eleven-going-on-twelve singing voice (a bit odd for a sixteen-year-old, but who knows, maybe like the whole American dollar/Canadian dollar difference thing, there's a difference in the puberty age exchange rate between us and our dear neighbors to the north) deserves the media hype, what do I know? But my God, we don't have just a Bieber nook on the magazine rack, we've got a Bieber enclave threatening to annex itself into a genuine fiefdom. If the kid gets a cooking show or takes up knitting or quilting, the FCC and the SEC are going to have to look into matters.

But why, why does this kid's grinning face grinning at me (and not with a hint of a smirk--the kid seems squeakily wholesome) from the cover of every other magazine I handle irk me so much--that's the question I've been dealing with all day. Is it those little taglines next to his picture ("Is Justin Boyfriend Material?"; "Could Justin Be Your BFF?"' "Is Justin A One-Girl Guy Or Is He A Playa?" [just one time I want to see one of these magazine hacks be brutally cynical: "Does Justin Have More Money Than You'll Ever See In Your Life?"]) that make me pine ruefully for the (obviously) misspent days of my youth? No, fifteen years of therapy have got me over that hump. It's the hair, plain and simple. I despise the young man's hair.

Now I thank God every day that I push closer to fifty that I still have enough follicles on my head to make me look (more?) unkempt every two months, and a trip to the barber is now a sacrament of Thanksgiving for me, but God almighty, Justin's head of hair gives me the insecure creeps. What would happen, I wonder, if I strolled into the barbershop next time with a picture of the Bieb and said, "Hey barber, could you make me look like this?" Would I be instantly fitted for a straightjacket? Would I be told not to say "cheese" in my mug shot? And what if, somehow, miraculously, the barber could wrangle my thin, brittle follicles into a genuine Bieber helmet? Would people fawn and envy? Would girls of all ages and dispositions swoon and twitter my name? Would the world collectively make that oh so cute heart symbol with their hands?

Maybe...nah. I've never prayed so fervently for a boy's voice to change and for him to experience the onset of male pattern baldness as I do now. Enjoy it, Justin, enjoy it all. Father Time's licking his chops.