For all of you who have seen my harried hairy state, you can stop coming up with nicknames. The beard has come off.
I’d been weighing this change for some time. I’ll review some of the pros and cons:
Itchiness
Food gets stuck in it
Mustache is long enough to curl around and get in mouth, but not long enough to fiendishly twirl it like “Snidely Whiplash"
It looks freaky to have hair poking up from the bottom of your line of sight
It can cause people to think you’re a bum/hippy/modern hobo
It can cause your sister to say you look Amish
It can cause you to spend too much time trying to explain who “Grizzly Adams” is to people born before 1977
Your chin stays wet a freakishly long time no matter how much effort you put into drying it
You are more likely to make yourself sneeze
It causes children to fear my freakish looks even more than usual
Pros
It covers 65 percent of facial acne
You can stroke your chin more thoughtfully
One is better insulated against wind
It takes so long to let the hair get to this point, if I shave it, I probably won’t return to the look
It requires ZERO MATINENCE
For the longest time, that last factor outweighed everything else. However, when meeting potential employers, one comes off better not looking like a haggard hippy.
As the classic Five Man Electric Band song from 1971 says, “And the sign said, ‘Long haired freaky people need not apply.’”
I know my parents have been concerned about the impression I could make, so I finally decided to clean myself up. I got a pair of barber’s scissors at an auction back in 1998. I’m not quite sure what my rationale was as the time other than, “This might be the only item I have enough money to bid on successfully.” I employed it over the years to take care of my shaggier edges in between barber visits. I’ve gone to the same barber for over a decade and am still wary of finding another one (I always seemed to make it back to Sullivan in time for another shearing, though those days may finally be over).
Anyway, I used the scissors to parry down the length of the hair before moving on to the razor. It reminded me a lot of the scene from The Royal Tenenbaums” when Richie finally cuts off his beard, just without the subsequent suicide attempt.
Considering my accident-prone nature, I’ve always figured shaving mistake was one of the more likely ways I off myself and have it mislabeled a suicide (“stumbling being mistaken for throwing myself into traffic” and “storing allergy medicine in a Tic-Tac container while traveling leading to an inadvertent overdose” being number one and three, respectively).
After I pruned enough hair to make a chubby mouse (or svelte hamster), I moved in with razors. Not wanting to ruin a new razor with a single use, I pulled some used razor heads I had yet to dispose of (which displays both how parsimonious I can be when I have no job as well as how callous I can be concerning my own face). Only once I had mowed through the rough patches, and effectively removed a layer of skin, did I come in to polish. In the end, I got the job done effectively with only a minimum amount of blood loss.
Thus ends another three-year cycle. For some reason, if you’d chart the length of my facial hair, you’d discover I’ve let it grow out every three years since I got facial hair. There’s no logic behind the pattern just like there was no obvious rationale for me getting hooked on soap operas every three summers. The soap opera loop dated back to middle school when “Another World” featured a subplot of two kids having fallen down a mineshaft. I’d been flipping through the channels, probably during a commercial break from the Disney Afternoon, and he sight of kids of my own age in peril had me hooked. Granted, you only saw them once or twice an episode. I had to sit through lots of scenes of adults bickering, which was boring, before I’d be rewarded with another update. I still can remember how the parents put a stuffed bear in a harness to ease the boy’s fears about being rescued, only for the rig to malfunction and send teddy tumbling into the darkness.
I never saw if the kids were rescued. I missed a couple episodes, and since it only takes a single commercial break for an evil twin to make a swap, a dead person to come back to life, or a teenager to suddenly turn 28, I had no chance of catching up. A couple years later, during a family vacation, I got hooked on “Days of Our Lives” when Hope was trying to solve a puzzle box to prove her identity and Sami was trying to mess up her sister’s wedding or something like that. Three years later I got caught up in the latest Stefano plot, and later after that, “Passions” snared me for a season. If I accomplished nothing else of value this summer, I finally broke the soap opera cycle.
My charting of the hair phenomenon is just as pointless as my suds graphing, though of a shorter duration because you don’t have to enter puberty to get hooked on soap operas (though it helps). The pattern simply exists, and though I’m sure it will one day be shattered like one of Stefano’s plans, we’ll have to wait until 2008 to see if it will continue.
And so we come to the question, what’s next in Caleb’s hair care?
My first response: blue hair dye.
I’m partially kidding. I’ve gone through a number of different looks lately and it has been observed that a “different” brother has visited each time I saw her at college. Going blue isn’t really an option since she reads this site and wouldn’t be as shocked by the appearance. That and my next visit will probably be to see the senior play she is directing, meaning a lot of relatives will be around making it a poor situation in which to introduce a radical change (college friends have told me it is best to get a belly piercing or low-riding tattoo in the winter [especially after New Year’s when less relatives are around, there is free time, and you still have some Christmas money} To get one in the summer is to invite a premature discovery before you can properly prepare them for the arrival).
Besides, I don’t care to look like an inverted Smurf. The last time I changed my hair myself was for a 2001 St. Patrick’s parade (and the green stuff I used was temporary). Still, if you have a suggestion for a new look to take to Truman, I’d be all ears. The only person who can’t vote is Hannah, because this is to be her surprise (sorry). Otherwise, all alterations will be considered. I’ll probably ignore them and do something else anyway, but I still invite the feedback. After all, I have played the part of Ken doll in the past (both for free and for money). You never know when I might try something new again.
