This is a young woman for whom looks are, by her admission (and the bald fact of whom she is dating (pun intended)), barely compelling. But she was at least momentarily intrigued. If I had to guess, that makes her the 2nd most-interested person in how the arrangement of hair on my head and face looks, generally.
No, I take that back. Third. Second place goes to my mother, whose displeasure with my hair is publicized in brief dismissive missives every crop cycle or so.
Still, the gold medal for "time spent mulling over the famine of hair on Rob's skull" goes to me, Rob. What was barely a tumescent curiosity in high school -- when I first noticed my hairline receding -- has flourished into an Akira-esque suppurating concern about how much happier and more fulfilled I'd be if only I had the proud coiffure of a Yale dog.
Vanity is inescapable, I conclude. That, or I'm not even trying to escape it.
I tried to write a story about a psychopath ("a" story) who decides, bit by bit, to remove all the hair on his body. It was motivated by a little sympathy on my part, which is typically the case, although I try to steer away from that kind of thing as hard as I can. I felt it was also an opportunity to try to mock my own real-life experience with shaving my head for the first time.
It didn't really 'work,' though. I think I realized that the head-shaving event had some emotional weight for me, and that it would therefore be good fruit for ridicule, but it just wasn't ripe yet. I'm too close to it, still, I guess.
I guess.
I shaved my head again last night. Kelly wasn't prophetic, just attentive; I've been threatening to do this for months. All it took was Mme. C saying "I SHAVED MY HEAD" to give me the ol' peer pressure I needed. And it was done sober, with an electric razor, quickly and shoddily enough that I woke to find I'd missed a few spots, making for an epiphanic experience that falls somewhere between "hearing Teri Gross tell a sad story on NPR" and "waiting in the lobby of a dentist's office."
So it was nothing like that first time. I think I knew that it wouldn't be, too. I think that in my fictional retelling of the first time I shaved my head, I tried to sexualize it, talking about the razor kissing the bare curves of my virgin scalp or something. There's something to that, but I think that's also the only way I know how to write insanity in a sensory way: take something within my own experience and inflate it beyond reason. It is also, I think, the more fun and titillating way to engage with sex and sexuality (other than actually, like, having sex): by being playful enough with it to discover it hiding out in contexts where it seems not to ordinarily belong.
Philip K Dick, whose "Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?" I finished a few weeks ago, apparently burst out of his little writer's shack one day (after presumably too many uses of amphetamine to fuel his mania) and had the religious experience of seeing a military gas mask hovering in the air. It became an obsessive vision for him, I'm told. I don't know that I can match that kind of genuine insanity without merely imitating it.
The first time I shaved my head was about three years ago. I was in graduate school, living in "2 bedroom equivalent" apartment carved out what a deity might provide if asked to demonstrate a boulder made of cheap wood and tile. These were the days I spent mostly bleary and growling, with nights spent mostly downing Seagrams 7 'whiskey' (no, Mme C, I did not treat my hangovers with McDonalds, but instead with grumpiness). It was about a year after splitting with my ex-fiance, rebounding for several months with an intoxicating half-French thing, and then rebounding again with the genuine French article. I was in the full rosy blush of frustrated, impatient, insecure anguish. And I was drunk, and probably singing.
So I took to the bathroom with my whole bottle of Seagrams (I wish I were kidding here) and proclaimed something, I'm sure, before starting to carve away at my head with an electric razor. But the electric razor I had at the time was a cheap gift meant for trimming beards. It did a poor job.
Concerned, but undeterred, I jumped into the shower, lathered my head, and 'bic'd it. And I kept the full beard. Which looked, I will tell you now, really terrible. I took a photo last night of the general effect; it's... Southern, in its "charms:"
And I wore that look for months!
Anyway, I don't know why I wrote this. I think I thought that exploring the topic of why I shaved my head would help me to understand why I shaved my head, or at least why it matters to me, but it's done none of that.
At the very least, I hope it can function as some kind of commiseration for Mme. C. Even if the hairy particulars are rather distinct.
