Cutting my own hair

I take a whack at it...

Not long ago I mentioned trying to cut my own hair and giving up because it took way too long and was much harder than I thought it would be. After that attempt I figured what the hell, now that barber shops were reopening, go see someone who knew that they were doing.

Then I read about two hair stylists at a barber shop right here in my home state of Misery who showed up for work despite having coronavirus symptoms and potentially exposed 140 people to COVID-19.

We’re only as safe as the biggest idiot in the room allows us to be and as those pictures of people partying at the Lake of the Ozarks demonstrate, we’ve got a lot of idiots in the room.

Back to Plan A.

So yesterday I put aside some time and thought just put your hand on your head and keep cutting whatever hair sticks up between your fingers and sooner or later you’ll have a haircut.

I can now report several things I didn’t realize earlier.

Hollywood lied…again

I like action movies because if I wanted to see someone be depressed I can just stay home and look in the mirror. (More on that momentarily.)

And in a number of those action movies some woman is on the run – she’s escaped from prison or the cops or some evil organization like the IRS – so she goes to the local CVS, buys some hair dye, goes into the bathroom of a seedy motel and 20 minutes later comes out looking like Vidal Sassoon and a gang of beauticians made her look like Audrey Hepburn.

(And yeah, I know Vidal is actually dead, but when it comes to famous hairdressers, that’s the only name I could think of.)

Anyway…

The fugitive woman’s new hairstyle is almost always short and spikey and makes her look “sassy” which is a Hollywood code word for “pain in the ass.”

I can now report those scenes are bullshit.

In reality she’d come out of the bathroom looking like she’d been attacked by an inebriated Benihana chef. If the FBI or CIA or NBA really wanted to find our female fugitive, all they would have to do is be on the lookout for someone with a crappy haircut and a hair dye stain on her neck.  

In the real world you cannot jump a Mustang fastback down the hills of San Francisco without screwing up the car’s front end alignment and you cannot cut your own hair and have it look terrific.

(BTW: if you didn’t get that Mustang reference, you really need to watch Steve McQueen in “Bullitt” and see where all that Fast & Furious stuff started.)

Where mullets come from

It also turns out it’s hard to use a mirror to cut your own hair for at least two reasons:

1. I couldn’t tell where the scissors actually were in relation to the clump of hair I intended to cut and kept missing my target and…

2. I couldn’t see the back of my head.

When I look in the mirror my haircut looks OK, but that’s because I can’t see the back which I had to cut by feel and God knows what’s currently going on back there.

I figure I can get away with leaving the back of my head alone for a while (after all, you have to look at it, not me), but if I keep cutting my own hair I’m going to wind up with a mullet and I’m pretty sure I’d rather take my chances with an infectious disease.

The mullet is one of the worst hairstyles in the history of hair and it dawned on me maybe it was originated by guys who didn’t have access to a barber and only come down out of the hills when there’s a party at the Lake of the Ozarks.

Useful information about the shaved head

While whacking away at my hair I started thinking about guys who shave their head and realized I have strong opinions in that area:

A. It looks better than a comb over or a monk’s fringe.

B. You better not have a lumpy head.

C. It looks better on black dudes than most white dudes because most white dudes with a shaved head look like they were involved in some kind of accident involving overexposure to radiation — think Jeff Bezos.

One white dude that can pull off the shaved-head look is former big league catcher Jason Kendall and I bring him up mainly because I wanted to tell yet another baseball story and this one involves facial hair.

Ballplayers get bored and do some goofy shit to amuse themselves, so Jason and a teammate (forget who it was) grew beards and then took the first at bat of the night with a full beard and after that went up to the clubhouse between each at bat and shaved a bit off.

So it went something like this…first at bat: full beard. Second: maybe a goatee. Third: a moustache: Fourth: clean shaven.

Folks watching the game must have thought they were losing their minds: “Hey, didn’t that dude have a beard when this game started?”

Players doing goofy shit is one of the reasons I love baseball and maybe sometime I’ll tell you about messages the infielders write in the dirt so infielders on the other team come out to play their half of an inning and are greeted with an insult regarding their sexual preferences or heritage.

On second thought; now we’re getting into all that political correctness crap so I’ll save those stories just in case we run into each other into a bar sometime. BTW: if that ever happens, you’re buying.

Turns out the secret ingredient is “product”

I was talking with a female friend about my attempt to cut my own hair and the uneven result and she told me something I didn’t know previously: if I put enough “product” in my hair it would smooth out the long and short parts and nobody would be able to spot my mistakes.

Who knew?

So now I figure I can keep cutting my own hair as long as I don’t run out of Brylcreem which I’m 100 percent sure is not what my friend meant by “product.”

But to get the product she’s talking about I’d probably have to visit a hair salon and right now I’m avoiding that, so I’ll continue to use Brylcreem which exhaustive internet research revealed was created in Britain in 1928 and is actually a mixture of water, mineral oil and beeswax.

And if a little dab doesn’t do me, I’ll try a big, sloppy handful.

Stay safe, everybody.