Hypnotizing the Barber

I finally culled the remains of my once-epic hair. The move was years in the making. Not an easy one, because I'd always been "the guy with the hair," even though that was years ago, before my pate started Gene Wildering.





It was hard to finally let go. I bought a hair clipper in mid-pandemic, and it sat unused on my kitchen table for six months before I took a deep breath and did the deed and sheared the beast.

My reaction, after relieving my scalp of its burden, was complete and utter indifference. Because I don't have to look at me. My eyes face the other way. So I felt exactly the same. How could it be otherwise, unless I told myself stories about it?

The sensation of sameness was the Truth, while cooked-up mental drama about "What This Means", or "How I Present Myself" would have been pure indulgence. Perhaps fun, or perhaps self-pitying, but ultimately unnecessary.

It's like the Christmas Eve I spent bouncing between feeling happy and comfortable, and seeing myself like an on-screen movie character, alone for the holiday, pathetically sad and miserable. It still gobsmacks me that I had such trouble divining the truer of the two perspectives. The one where you're not telling yourself stories about what's happening is reality, while story-telling is inherently indulgent fantasy. I have nothing against indulgent fantasy (aka contrived bullshit). I don't consider it sinful or wrong. Just unnecessary and best suspended if it's not making you happy.

The burning question was: How had I become so deluded that contrived bullshit felt as real as reality? How could I wind up flailing so hard to distinguish obvious truth? To literally come back to my senses? This so rattled me that I felt compelled to figure it all out, which led to whatever it is the Slog has turned out to be (I charted the trajectory here).

To my enormous surprise, I turn out not to be a naturally skillful barber. I looked like a rambunctious three-year-old's crayon drawing. So I let the chopped salad grow out a bit, and finally headed to a barbershop, where I asked the barber to keep it all super short, and mostly just clean up my atrocities. He laughed politely, and asked me how much FADE I want.

I said not much. Nothing ostentatious. I don't want to look like I'm trying hard. If a "10" were a Hummer-driving mid-level coke dealer, and a "1" were Homer Simpson, make me like a "3".

Silence.

The barber had fallen into a hypnotized trance (if I'd urged him to cluck like a chicken, he'd surely have done so). Why? Because I'd said something no one had previously said to him, and barbers are in a groove of doing the usual things to the usual people making the usual requests. Then in walks this lunatic, and just the mere phrase "Hummer-driving mid-level coke dealer", much less the whole unorthodox - however expressive - manner of explaining my desires, was so utterly outside the bounds of his constricted and comfortable slice of the universe that everything stopped cold for a moment. He'd been disrupted.

Realizing I was not going to be getting his best work, I begged off, saying an emergency had come up. And next time I'll try hard to state my request in the affably muddled manner to which barbers are accustomed. Because not only is everyone (including, of course, me) "a foggy incompetent heedless feckless dweeb," per my paraphrase of Matt Groening's brilliant insight in my previous posting, but the world counts on it. Runs on it. 

If you work on a chain link fencing assembly line and thoughtfully add your link in novel and delightful ways, you will disrupt the process. You must not make people stop and think in this life, prompting them to respond freshly and spontaneously. Your extra effort is not only wasted, it's counterproductive.

Really, the world hasn't been failing me; I've been failing it. Creativity does not pay. Surprising behavior, alas, breaks things.