New Years Day

I've always thought New Year's resolutions were for chumps. You've thought it, too. Even when you made them. You knew it. If something is worth doing, you don't wait for some arbitrary calendar point to start doing it. It's the worst kind of bosh and the flimsiest flimshaw. There is nothing about Fatty on December 31, 2009, that will change because the phone says January 1, 2009. In fact, if you saw fit to wait for the new year to implement your mythical weight loss/work out odyssey, I will put my reputation on the line with a guarantee that you will be just as out of shape this time next year, when you can baste yourself with the creamy butter of pretending to give a crap once again. I can find it in my heart to wish you a hearty and earnest "good luck," but I've not looked to make any resolutions since I became an adult.



This year, however, the resolution found me.



I've been cutting my own hair SUCCESSFULLY for over ten years. (I've actually been cutting it for 15, but the first five weren't pretty.) Even at the bargain basement price of $10 a month times twelve months times ten years, I've saved $1,200 dollars over the past decade. Almost enough to pay the overdraft fees and late penalties I accrued last year. I've settled into a groove. I know what I'm doing. These days, when I tell someone I'm my own personal barber, they are usually at least a little impressed.

New Year's day found me back at the mirror for a trim. By now the clippers are on automatic pilot. I'm cruising towards the same old thing, when suddenly, for reasons no scientician can explain, all bearings go haywire for a split second and I carve a gash into the back of my hair way up--to near the very crown. Horrified, I mutter a list of profanities no barber should even know and proceed to give myself a necessity cut that is wrong on every level. Shape: jarhead. Implication: past, current, or future marine. Subtext: mistake. Revelations: you are not as deft as you thought, and your head has a funny shape when revealed naked to the day. Possibilities: mockery, pity, and worse, affection from unpleasant sources.

Hence, the resolution writes itself. I'll be growing my hair out at long last. Because by the time this grows out, I'll be truly accustomed to the hat. This same hat will take me past the painful transitional period between ugly white man fro and whatever the future holds.

Besides for at least the foreseeable future, I'm scared to take the clippers in hand for anything but minor manscaping. (Which is another story all together.)