The Butcher of Seville
Recently I have been thinking about shaving my head. I am not considering doing this to be fashionable, however. Nor is it because I'm sick of my long hair, as I just got a haircut yesterday. That's why I'm thinking of shaving my head.
Just once I would like to meet a barber who understands the phrase "Just a little off the top." Using this phrase has resulted in my becoming a hair-style trendsetter of trends that never quite catch on, such as the half-Mohawk and Benedictine monk styles. Once I even ended up with a ponytail and the word "Party" shaved into my left sideburn. I'm almost certain this was more than a simple misunderstanding and suspect drugs may have been involved. I haven't been to the "Hair-oin" chain of salons since.
I thought I had found a solution to this problem by pointing at my current haircut and saying, "A shorter version of this," but that was before I realized that barbers don't actually care what you request. The reason for this is that there are no longer any barbers in existence. They have all mutated into hair styling professionals.
Hair styling professionals are only concerned with "creating a look," and they do not care if you look good or not. It is a similar phenomenon to what has occurred in modern art. Indeed, it is no coincidence that frustrated performance artists who cannot get grants from the NEA are turning to a career in hair design.
Thus, when you gaze at yourself in the mirror and see the reflection of a survivor of an encounter with a rogue weedwhacker, you are likely to receive an interpretive soliloquy from your stylist. "See, this says 'I'm a 90's woman....'" "I'm not a woman," I interrupt. "Exactly," replies the stylist condescendingly. "It's all about contradictions. You see the harsh point of one sideburn and say, "This guy has it together," but then you see no sideburn on the other side, and it just stops you. It's about re-examining prejudices and preconceptions, it's about rage, it�s about love. And it's about $23.50."
Noting that I still had enough hair to get it cut again, I headed to another hair emporium unaware that hair designers had become pandemic. I knew I was in trouble as soon as I sat in the chair. "Chaos and terror! See the fury of the hurricane sweeping down!" proclaimed the styling artist as his scissors and comb whirred around my ears. "Lightning, fire, storm! Peace, calm, tranquility." The scary thing was that I was actually starting to understand what he was saying.
This is not to say that I liked my haircut. I figured that I would just wear a hat to the basketball game that night and shave my head when I got home, and no one would ever know. Then the stylist reached for his bottle of "smelly stuff" and slopped in on before I could do anything to stop him. This is the hair designer's way of marking his territory to make sure that everyone within olfactory range knows that you hair has been "styled."
Unfortunately for me, guys at basketball games do not generally wear perfume, and if they do they choose something that smells somewhat subtler than rhinoceros urine. I pictured them saying, "My, that's an attractive stench you're wearing. Did you by any chance purchase that fragrance from Madame Broussard's House of Parisian Pleasures?"
In order to avoid this embarrassment, I cleverly poured a bottle of beer over my head so as to smell appropriately for the game. I'm sorry to say it didn't work, and now I smell like I have been piddled on by a drunken rhino. So while I'm debating whether to shave my head, I'm staying clear of the zoo. I don't want to have to fight the rhino for the territory.
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