I've been getting my haircut at the same little barber shop, Hair of Today, since I was five or six years old. Jerry, the owner, kept Star Wars comic books and Dum-Dums suckers on hand for the kids. Country music was always playing on the radio; I've listened to a lot of Kenny Rogers in that barber shop. My parents once traded him our parrot, a yellow-naped Amazon, for one hundred haircuts. Jerry kept the bird in the shop until the health department made him take it home. (More about Jerry here.)

Jerry sold Hair of Today while I was gone to college. Howard, the new owner, is a sportsman, an active hunter and fisherman. He makes occasional trips to Alaska for the Iditarod. Posters of huskies and sleds hang on the walls.

I've never been hunting and I've never been fishing, but it can be pleasant to listen to the manly banter about elk and steelhead. Yesterday was an ordeal.

The guys weren't jawing about hunting and fishing, they were jawing about trucks and politics. One guy had recently purchased a big-ass truck from Canby Ford with zero-percent interest, but he thought the contract was too restrictive. "If you're late on one payment, they've got you by the balls." This led to the generalized cursing of finance companies. Then each fellow got to share memories of his first truck.

Then the subject turned to politics. First the guys railed against the Portland city council. One of the barbers (who shall remain nameless in this forum) declared that Portland Mayor Vera Katz was a "hippie lesbian", as if it were fact, and as if this made her worthy of condemnation.

From local politics the conversation moved, naturally enough I guess, to world politics. Ever wonder whence came Bush the Second's high approval rating? It came from Hair of Today, and places like it. The consensus yesterday was that the U.S. ought to use tactical nuclear strikes (note plural) to "get that fucker out of Iraq".

In certain groups, I stand up to ideas with which I disagree. This isn't one of those groups. When conversation heads south in Hair of Today, I just grin wanly and nod my head.

The worst part of the ordeal was the actual haircut. The same guy's been cutting my hair for the past couple of years, and we have a sort of ongoing conversation; he's an older fellow that used to work as an environmental consultant in New Jersey, and who has, in the past, played a lot of computer games. He usually asks me if I want my hair cut "the same as before". I've never trusted his memory, so I usually say something like, "Yup -- clipper cut on the sides, a bit longer on top. Squared in the back. Kind of a standard business-man's haircut." Yesterday I decided that by now he must remember how I like it, so I didn't give him this reminder. Oops. Bad haircut.

Worse, as he's finishing, the guy asks me, "Eyebrows trimmed?"

Eyebrows trimmed?!?!

What the hell? Do I have bushy eyebrows? Do they need trimming? Way to make a guy paranoid, you know? I rushed home to scrutinize my eyebrows in the bathroom mirror. They look the same as before. They don't seem bushy to me, but for the rest of my life I'll be worried that there's something wrong with my eyebrows…

(Trivia: I may just be eyebrow paranoid. I can remember once in Mrs. Gwynn's first-period geometry class my freshman year of high school, Dawn Evans laughed at my eyebrows, told me that I had a monobrow. This scarred me. Ever since then, I shave at the top of my nose, between the eyebrows. Nobody's going to laugh at my eyebrows (or eyebrow, as the case may be), thank you very much.)

Once or twice a month, as Kris and I are getting ready for work in the morning, she'll start to tell me a story. My heart sinks when this happens, not because I don't want to hear the story, but because her stories take a l-o-n-g time to tell.

This morning she told me about a show she watched on PBS the other night about the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till (also here). It took her fifteen minutes to tell the story, and the whole time I was thinking, "I'm going to be late. I'm going to be late."

Kris is aware that we have this story vs. promptness conflict, yet the early morning is when she's moved to tell me about work, or about the book she's reading, or about her family. I'd love to hear these stories as we're falling asleep, but that doesn't suit her. So, I get to hear the stories as we're getting ready in the morning. I'm sometimes late for work because of it.

Fortunately, I wasn't late today.

I'm in trouble.

On this day at foldedspace.org

2005 — Tangerine Trees and Marmalade Skies   Goofy Entry Day is now an annual event. :)

2004 — When the bullet hits the bone!   My beacon's been moved under moon and star. Really, today's entry contains a lot of photos and links to goofy stuff. You should come see it. Honestly.

2002 — In Xanadu did Kubla Khan...   I was a child of average intelligence and little passion for learning. I ran. I played. And at an early age, I emulated my father's dysfunctional social behaviors.