Bullshit

Hesitate, You Die

Photo by Matt Bero on Unsplash

Like everyone else, I have longed to destroy my hair. Ungainly and uncontrollable, it has plagued me from my earliest days. The Eras of my hair all have ominous names:

Unkempt Straw

Brown Helmet

No Party Mullet

The Fin

Which brings us to the most recent era: Thinning Mess. But no matter what you do, it keeps growing back, with lessening volume and increasing misfortune. Remarkably, however, one of the few bright sides for me during the Year of Lockdown had to do with my hair: I started cutting it myself. And thank fucking god.

The Freaks are Winning

Haiorcuts are right up there with teeth cleanings in terms of horrifying forced intimacy. Just as I think my dentist can see straight down into my gross, Cheetoh-eating soul, I figure my barber can take one look at my hair and know what kind of life I’m living (hint: Not good). I dread the small talk, and I have a tendency to doze off while it’s happening, which can have catastrophic results on the actual haircut I end up with. After decades of suffering through banal conversation and the creepy experience of having some weirdo touch my head, I finally found a local barber who fit my ideal: She operated in virtually complete silence. Our entire conversation consisted of the same two questions:

Barber: How are you?

Me: Fine, thanks.

Barber: Same thing?

Me: Yes.

The “same thing,” it should be noted, is a #3, a little longer on top, square back. As you can see from the photos above, I have learned to not try anything fancy when it comes to my hair.

This was an acceptable situation, though it left me vulnerable to my barber’s vacations and appointment schedule. Every now and then I had to go to an alternate, and they were inevitably chatty folks who exhibited an unseemly curiosity about me. Why we can’t all just perform our duties in grim silence, I’ll never understand.

And then the pandemic hit.

When we all retreated into our homes like hobbits to peer fearfully through the window blinds, my hair was not a major priority for me. Hardening the house against the inevitable zombie hordes was pretty much my priority for the first few weeks, and when that began to seem increasingly unlikely and I realized I might someday have to step back into civilizaed society (a disappointment to be sure) I realized I was going to have to figure out the whole haircut thing. So I decided to order some clipper and do it myself. And I will never go back.

The DIY

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that my hair is not complicated, and a trained ferret would be able to cut my hair with minimal training. My needs are few — actually, my needs are one: I just don’t want to look crazy. And so far, mission accomplished, which means it’s been more than a year since I had to sit in a strange chair while a stranger snipped at my hair, clucking in disapproval and suggesting an endless stream of hair products I should be using but never will.

It’s been great. My hair still betrays me, and if there was a pill that would stop it from growing forever I would take two, immediately, without water. Until then, I will continue to shave my own head, like an exceptionally smart monkey, and I welcome you to my new Hair Era: The DIY. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to see if I can shave my entire body without asking for help, because the tiny demon in this bottle of whiskey told me to.

When Jeff Imagines Himself a Techie

I’m buying my first new computer in <checks notes> seven years. Another huge desktop for me, thanks; while I love phones and tablets and use cloud storage endlessly, I still love me some hardware, especially *upgradeable* hardware.

I tend to overdo my specs, in the sense that I am not nearly the power user I imagine I am, so my ridiculous CPU, L5, and GPU combo is probably 150% of what I might need. But this also means I expect to be able to use the computer for, well, seven years or so without feeling any lag. My old rig is just starting to feel a bit wonky, for example; I probably could get a few more useful years out of it.

I didn’t build my own because I’m lazy as hell, and also because my discipline when it comes to things like static electricity is … not good. When I was 20 I owned a delightful 1978 Chevy Nova, and one day decided to finally put a radio in. Instead of paying someone to do it, like a sucker, I did it myself, and managed to short out the entire electrical system. That’s-a-me when it comes to any sort of electricity. So ramming sticks of RAM into a motherboard is not my best option.

Besides, when I used to be a serious tinkerer, I lost years off my life due to incompetence.

The Black Screen of Nothingness

I realize most of my anecdotes are concerned with my incompetence, drunkenness, and general lack of capability and smarts, but that is such a deep well of material (it really is a wonder I’m not dead in some sort of bread-making accident, or perhaps drowned in a kid’s pool full of beer foam) I can’t resist.

Back in the late 1990s I became interested in how computers worked. Like, I woke up one day and realized these things were here to stay and so I wanted to understand them. I read a book on Assembly programming (no, really, I did), and I was astounded to discover that there were alternatives to Microsoft Windows, and you could set your computer up to dual boot between Windows and something else.

Theoretically.

I did some research. Back then Linux was essentially a box full of random parts, so I decided my best choice was BSD, because BSD was rumored to come on like 150 CDs with every possible application ready to be installed, including a bunch of window managers for the full GUI experience. All you had to do was literally reach into the Deep Magic of your hard drive and set it up to dual-boot. Which I would not recommend you try to do for the first time on your one and only computer, the computer you rely on for your Internet connection, word processing, and game playing. Because if you do, what happened to me might happen to you: I meticulously followed the instructions I’d printed out, rebooted my computer, and … nothing.

A black screen. Not even a complaint. Just … nothing. The computer turned on, saw what I had wrought, and just sat there, transformed by my buffoonery into the world’s worst space heater.

Oh, shit

Now, this was back in the Dark Ages. I didn’t have a smart phone or a tablet or even a second computer, so I had no access to the Internet. So all I could do was review my hard copies and try a few dozen emergency maneuvers to try and at least get back to zero. I suppose I could have gone out and found one of those old-school Internet Cafes or a library offering Internet access. Instead, I chose to stay up all night and stare into the void that my tiny 13-inch computer screen had recently become.

I eventually clawed my way back into control. I forget exactly what Master Boot Record magic I had to perform, but I did finally get the damn computer to dual-boot Windows and BSD. Which was a mixed blessing, because BSD Unix was not a user-friendly experience, and I didn’t get very far with it. But I did have the sense of having mastered the universe, which for me was and is a very rare experience. But back then I had a lot of time on my hands, being a single dude with very little ambition. These days I have to be more careful with my time — and my sanity.

Still, I like knowing that I have the power to completely ruin my evening, any time I wish.

Sticking the Landing

As a professional writer, I have my tricks. One of those tricks involves excusing myself to the bathroom just before the bar bill arrives, then climbing out the window and fleeing. Another trick is what I call the Plane Crash Ending (PCE). I employ the PCE when I’ve got a story without an ending. Maybe it’s a 60,000+ word novel, or a 1500 word short story; either way, I can’t figure out how to end it. So I kill everyone. Every character. I kill them all in whatever way seems feasible. Then I type THE END and put the story aside, and usually when I come back to it I have a better ending in mind.

The PCE is fun. It’s not a viable way to end a story, but sometimes a story can be 90 percent great and then dissolve into a sticky mess at the end. This happens to a lot of stories — including, of course, many stories that do get published or broadcast or released in move theaters. Which leads me to a fundamental question about writing/art: Does a bad ending ruin a good story?

Bran the Broken Indeed

Let’s consider the current ur-example of bad endings, Game of Thrones. I was prompted to think about this subject in the first place by an essay by Michael Walsh over at The A.V. Club, in which he remembers why he fell in love with the show originally. He’s right: Game of Thrones was pretty damn excellent for 6+ seasons. It was grand, it was complex, it was unpredictable (if you hadn’t read the books). And then it was absolutely fucking terrible in its last, oh, ten episodes or so.

I have an acquaintance who can’t forgive a bad ending — so much so that he won’t watch serialized TV shows until they’re finished, because he can’t countenance the wasted time of getting into something only to see it rot in front of his eyes. I get that, but I’m on the opposite side of the question. I think there’s tons of value in the journey.

We used to argue over Lost, another show that (IMHO) devolved into a crapfest in its final season. For a while, that show was intriguing and messy in a good way. Then it kind of rambled into a confusing jumble, but the late-run reset from flashbacks to flashforwards brought me back. Then — again, IMHO — it got really, really awful in its final run. My acquaintance damns the show for eternity for wasting his time. I’m happy I got to experience those truly amazing twists and character beats. It was fun, and a bad ending doesn’t change that.

Or does it? I’ll admit that the re-watch value of a show or a re-read value of a book series goes down if I know the ending will be a frustrating disaster. It’s not that endings don’t matter at all — it’s just that I don’t think they wipe out all the existing value of a work that was good for at least a significant part of its run.

Of course, I am a man who just admitted he has dozens of manuscripts lying around his hard drive with Plane Crash Endings. I am obviously not an authority on this issue. Carry on.

Misadventures in Drinking: Jack and Cokes

FRIENDOS, I was not always the suave middle-aged man you know and love (er, tolerate?). I was, for a surprisingly long time, an idiot. For example, when I began my legitimate, legal drinking career (in contrast to my illegal minor-league drinking career) I had very little of what you might call taste. Was lite beer involved? So, so much.

Also: Jack and Cokes.

Look, life is a learning exercise. I will not pretend that I came out of the womb understanding music theory and appreciating good whiskey; you have to go through some wrong turns before you figure things out. What’s funny is that when I was young I learned to drink my whiskey straight because it was such a furtive experience — taking the time to mix a cocktail meant more exposure, more chances to get caught. When I found myself of legal age, however, I wasn’t quite ready to start ordering two fingers of rye, mainly because I’d never learned to pace myself. If you handed me two fingers of rye, ten seconds later I had an empty glass and I was ordering another.

So mixing my liquor was a good strategy, and I started drinking Jack and Cokes because they were whiskey-adjacent and sweet, went down easy, but also diluted everything so I didn’t end up on the floor of whatever divey bar I was in.

Usually.

Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day

The scene: I’m probably 25 years old. At the time I worked in publishing, and we had Summer Hours, which were kind of amazing. Every year during the summer you could opt to work an extra hour or two Monday through Thursday and then leave work at 2PM on Friday. It was awesome, and naturally everyone took the opportunity to head to the local dive bar and start their weekend at exactly 2:05PM. So I’m in a shithole bar that was probably called Mickey’s or Danny’s or something like that, drinking my Jack and Coke and bullshitting with my coworkers.

At some point, a few folks ordered a round of drinks but then mysteriously left the bar, so a trio of Jack and Cokes were left on the bar next to us, glistening and paid for. And a co-worker jokingly suggested I drink them quickly before the universe noticed its mistake and took them back. And I thought, gosh it would be hilarious if I did just that so I reached over and shotgunned all three in the space of about a minute.

It was kind of hilarious. For about thirty seconds.

I now suspect I know what it’s like to fall into a coma. As I crawled to the bathroom on what is probably the filthiest floor imaginable, the world receded from me and I swear I saw a shining light and possibly some form of Buddy Jesus grinning down at me, gesturing that my time had come. And I think it was Buddy Jesus holding my hair out of my eyes as I vomited several organs into the scabby toilet in that dive bar.

I emerged bug-eyed, the knees of my trousers damp. I collected my things without a word and walked out of there. My takeaway centered on the coke part of the Jack and Coke, and I swore to only take my liquor neat from that moment on.

Buddy Jesus rode with the bus with me all the way home. That guy is creepy AF.

Misadventures in Drinking: The Depth Charge

Note: This little essay is about alcohol, which means a more competent person would have a) written it in time to post on St. Patrick’s Day instead of (checks notes) x days later, and would have somehow arranged to partner with a liquor company that’s been sending him emails about trading free booze for promotion. Instead, here I am drinking on my own dime like a sucker and making terrible decisions like a … well, like a Somers. It’s kind of our brand.

FRIENDOS, we all know that Jeff likes a drink. I went to my doctor recently for my annual checkup, and the standard screening questions took a turn when we came to the part about how many alcoholic drinks do you consume. There was, not gonna lie, an awkward silence that lasted some time. The only saving grace came a day later when my blood test results came back and it was determined that I have the bodily functions of a much younger man. I have the liver function of a robust teenager, in fact. But it was a tense moment.

Now, my love for booze has been part of my personal brand for most of my adult life. It’s a bit hackneyed, sure, and a little Basic. But I believe we all have the right to be a little Basic. Just because a middle-aged man slurping whiskey isn’t exactly hip is no reason not to enjoy it as a persona, dammit, and I will die on that hill.

That being said, The Drink has not always been my friend. In fact, it has occasionally been a humiliating enemy.

THE DEPTH CHARGE

I am an incredibly simple person. I don’t like complexity, and I don’t like actually spending times on things. If lunch can’t be made in under a minute, I don’t want lunch. That’s what you’re dealing with. So it shouldn’t be surprising that I have never trucked with cocktails. If a drink requires preparation beyond a pull tab or a pour, I am not interested.

But! I was once young and foolish, just like you. So there was a brief period when I attempted to be classy and sophisticated and continental, which meant trying out cocktails of different sorts. The idea was to order something with a recipe so I could be very picky about the ingredients and preparation, implying all sorts of life experience I did not, and still do not, have.

There were failed experiments as I resisted my fate as a shot-and-a-beer type. I threw a Martini Party and downloaded several Martini recipes from the Internet, including a Chocolate Martini that yielded … regrettable results. I volunteered one New Year’s Eve to mix up a bunch of different specialty shots, including a Bubblegum Shot that resulted in one of my friends wandering the remnants of the party with a pie-eyed look on his face, draining the dregs of everyone’s drinks until he literally fell over.

But my most humiliating (and therefore best) attempt at cocktails involves something called the Depth Charge, which is not even really a cocktail, adding a nice layer of ridiculousness to this story that is very on-brand.

A Depth Charge is, in theory, a shot of whiskey dropped into a pint of beer. The idea, as it was explained to me, is that you drop in the shot and the chug the beer. Why? I have no idea. I had no idea then, and I have no idea now. Was I trying to impress a girl? Possibly. Does that make this even more humiliating? Definitely.

We were in a dive bar in Manhattan, the sort of place where you avoid going to the bathroom because you’re worried about contracting the Andromeda Strain. I don’t recall how the Depth Charge made its way to my table (which may explain my thought process, or lack thereof), but once it appeared in front of me, it was Challenge: Accepted! time.

I knew I was in trouble within the first few seconds. I dropped the shot glass into the pint glass and everyone looked at me like I was insane, which made me suddenly wonder if I’d fundamentally misunderstood the entire process. I am a man who never admits error, however, so I just lifted the roiling drink and tipped it back to the growing horror of my friends.

Chugging beer has never been a skill set for me, and things went south quickly. Whiskey-infused beer began dripping down my chin, all over me, the table, literally everywhere. I kept going (see above re: Never admitting error) offering a cheery thumb’s up to let everyone know that this was all part of the expected procedure. When I finished there was more beer on the floor than inside me, making the Depth Charge the least-efficient drink ever devised. There was a lengthy period of awkward silence.

I was later banned from that particular bar, for totally related reasons.

The moral of this story? Keep your drinks simple, or your Inner Idiot will seize the opportunity to make you look foolish. Ever since then, I drink my beer and whiskey quite separately, thank you. The results are just as humiliating, usually, but there’s much less mess.

The Most Polite of All Muggings

Camouflage Velcro wallet

I GREW up in Jersey City, New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s funny; people who have never been to Jersey City in their lives will often assume that it must be a crime-ridden shithole — and especially so during the 1970s — simply because they hear the word ‘Jersey’ in there (twice, even!). Or because they’re racist asshats and Jersey City is very diverse, that is also a possibility, yes.

I am here to tell you that Jersey City was a great place to grow up. I was a pretty free-range kid, and roamed the streets at all hours and never once got abducted or knifed or forced to kill innocent tourists as part of an elaborate gang initiation rite.

Of course, I was a very soft, eyeglass-wearing child. It’s possible the gangs simply didn’t want me.

Anyways, none of this is to say that Jersey City was a paradise. It had (has) it’s bad areas, and I did have several brushes with crime during my formative years. I once got a brand new Huffy dirtbike for my birthday, and about three days later while I struggled to ride it ON TRAINING WHEELS two teenagers came over, casually pushed me off, and stole it. Once, when my friends and I were hanging out in a park about one block from my house, we were accosted by a group of older kids who made off with my one friend’s leather jacket. Shit happened. It’s a city, after all.

But I’m not here to talk about those minor brushes with crime. I’m here to talk about the most polite mugging ever.

Road to Nowhere

When I was maybe 12 or 13, my friend and I went to the 440 Mall, probably to see a movie and/or play video games at the huge arcade that once resided there. It’s weird to Present Day Jeff (aka Very Very Aged Jeff) how important malls were to Young Jeff; much energy and time was spent scheming on how to get to a mall and how to fund those excursions.

Coming home, my friend and I got on the wrong bus. By the time we realized we were going away from home, we were in an unfamiliar and kind of scary-looking section of town. We got off in a panic, got ourselves oriented, and began walking back to the bus depot through some pretty sketchy neighborhoods. This is when I experienced the most polite mugging of my life.

A group of older kids surrounded us and began walking with us and chatting us up. They offered us cigarettes, inquired after our health, and then calmly threw us up against a wall and began searching our pockets. To say I was petrified would be an understatement. I’d watched television. I knew how these muggings ended. I prepared for death.

I remember I had a Velcro wallet with a camouflage design, because I was 13 and Velcro wallets were cool.

The kids, upon discovering that we had nothing but pocket lint and dreams between us, helped us up, dusted us off, returned our Velcro wallets and told us, cheerfully, that we were lucky because we had nothing worth stealing. Then they happily offered us directions and waved as they walked off.

I’m not making any of that up. They almost made me feel cheerful about being robbed. What’s interesting to me is that my brushes with criminals have always been kind of weirdly polite, while my interactions with police have always been negative and stressful. Weird, that.

The Avery Cates Series in Order

Since I started writing new Avery Cates stories a few years ago, things have gotten out of hand in terms of keeping track of the order of the stories. With novellas that combine into novels like Voltron, it gets even messier. So here’s the master list of Cates stories, in series order.

AVERY IN ORDER

Short Story: The Kendish Hit

Original Book Series:

  1. The Electric Church
  2. The Digital Plague
  3. The Eternal Prison
  4. The Terminal State
  5. The Final Evolution

New Book Series:

  1. The Shattered Gears:
  2. The Burning City
  3. The Machines of War

Hope that clarifies!

All Creatures Great and Small

I want to tell you about the summer I spent reading James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small in the galley of a tugboat.

A writing career doesn’t just happen. You come to writing in your own way, along your own path. By the time I was sitting in that tugboat’s galley, I’d already been writing stories for a few years. Sci-fi and fantasy, mainly, with some weirdo crime stories thrown in for spice. In high school I wrote some stories that threw wild Twilight Zone twists into careworn plots because everything seemed new to me, and I wrote some stories about high school kids who committed terrible crimes, disappeared for a decade, and suddenly showed up at their high school reunion to reveal what really happened while their former classmates gasped and sighed and schemed to seduce them. You know, typical stuff. Pretty bad stuff.

My parents, god rest their souls, insisted that my brother and I get paying jobs once we turned 14. Of course, my brother and I were generally loafing incompetents, so the actual finding of said jobs was kept out of our hands. My father worked at a local bank (this was back when there were such things as local banks), so he got us jobs in the mailroom. I spent a summer walking around an office building delivering mail and listening to music on my Walkman1. Then I would go home and my mother would confiscate my earnings and tell me I was lucky. I didn’t feel lucky, but you couldn’t argue with my mother.

The next year, however, that job wasn’t available, so we had to get creative2. My father had an acquaintance who ran a drilling company, and he finagled a job for me3. The job wasn’t very closely defined, so one Monday morning my Mom drove me to the asscrack of Jersey City4, and a bunch of befuddled and slightly hungover men pondered what in hell to do with me.

The Tug Boat, Exciting and New5

After spending some eye-opening days with the functioning alcoholics who worked for the drilling company, I was eventually assigned to help spruce up an old tug boat. The company kept a few tugs in order to tow their drilling platforms around, and this one looked and smelled like it had been bought at auction around 1870 and left to rot for a while.

My ‘supervisor’ for the tug reclamation project was an older gentleman who was also living on the tugboat6. This disturbed me, because I would show up every morning and he’d emerge from the cabin, coughing and scratching himself, which made me feel like I was visiting some distant cousin, because all of my cousins emerged from their own bedrooms coughing and scratching in exactly the same way7.

I don’t remember the guy’s name. Let’s call him Earl.

Earl never assigned me any work. He made a few vague suggestions here and there, usually without any sort of context or explanation, and I quickly figured out that I could ignore these suggestions with impunity. Earl would then go off to do mysterious things in the engine area, emerging frequently to smoke cigarettes. I kept waiting for Earl to burst into flames after spending an hour shoulder deep in gasoline and engine oil and lighting up. As the summer dragged on, this became an increasingly attractive possibility.

I was borrowing my parents’ car to get to work every day, which was a perk. Once, leaving the yard, Earl asked if I would give him a ride to a local bar. About six other guys piled in, and I remember being impressed with how fast Earl could move when properly motivated. He made it from the car to the bar within seconds. I was too young to appreciate the value of this skill.

Anyway, since I had no actual work to do, I spent a lot of time in the tug’s filthy galley, where I found a single book: All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot (a pseudonym). These stories are about a veterinary surgeon who lives and works in a small English town. This is not exactly what 16-year old Jeff would have chosen to read, but I didn’t feel comfortable bringing activities to the job. It’s one thing to sit on your ass all day for minimum wage, it’s something else entirely to flash about how little work you’re doing. So I had nothing else to do but read that book.

And I read the hell out of that book.

It’s delightful! And charming. And completely different from what I’d been reading my whole life, and in that sense, transformative. I’d never imagined I could be so enthralled with these stories of animals and quiet country life. Sure, boredom was a factor. Possibly also fumes of some sort. But it taught me that I needed to be a little more wide in my reading, that perhaps stories that had survive for years or decades or centuries did so because they were awesome in their own way.

Eventually, it was discovered that I was basically doing nothing on that tug. I didn’t get fired, because technically no one had told me to do anything. I was not and am not a lawyer, but I lawyered that situation. And basically managed to get paid to read a book, which makes me a genius under international law.

Sweat Equity. Sweat the Small Stuff. Sweat Everything. Sweat.

Photo by Hans Reniers, Unsplash

FRIENDOS, I am a sweaty man.

I inherited this from my father, who was a deeply unhealthy man who could often be found eating entire jars of peanut butter at the kitchen table at 3AM. Seriously, we had to hide the peanut butter from him, but he always found it. When my father did chores around the house, he would tie a bandanna around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes, because that man was one enormous sweat gland.

And so am I, despite the fact that I don’t eat entire jars of peanut butter. I can only conclude that this general air of sweatiness is inherited. The Somers genes are certainly miraculous. I try to imagine what possible evolutionary advantage this level of sweat could possibly afford, and the best I can come up with is that it lubricates us in terrifying situations so we can squeeze through extremely narrow spaces. This makes sense, as we Somers’ are clearly a prey species.

In the modern world, however, where we Somers’ are allowed to burrow deep within the comforting fluff of civilization and are thus spared from most forms of predation, this full-body dampness serves little purpose except to make me appear consistently nervous or consistently on the verge of a heart attack.

IN WHICH I MAKE MY WIFE UNCOMFORTABLE

There are people in this world who enjoy eating outside, al fresco, no matter the temperature or the sunlight situation. God love these people, these happy idiots. I am not one of them. I sweat under arctic conditions, and sitting in the sun while eating hot food (or cold food, or ice cubes, or just breathing in a steady and unalarming manner) causes me to perspire wildly.

My brother, Yan, is someone who can sit in full sunlight when it’s 105 degrees out and eat a piping hot bowl of pasta without complaint. Just thinking about that makes me sweat through my shirt. How this genetic disparity happened, I don’t know, though it supports my long, deep suspicion that my brother and I are not actually related.

The other day my wife, The Duchess, and I were sitting outside in the sun, for some reason, having lunch. This was not my choice, as I am well aware of my dislike for sweating, or being outside, or eating my own lunch like a sucker instead of having it fed to me like the emperor I was born to be. This was, in other words, a triumph of The Duchess’ will. Meaning she insisted.

It was extremely hot, and so my body did what it always done when I eat in the heat: It assumed I was being force-fed by Imperial Torturers and began to shut down in self-defense. This is also, apparently, part of my genetic code, and the reason that the Somers family has survived into 2020 where so many other famous families have not. There are no more Caesars or Plantagenets, friends, but the world is lousy with Somers’.

My wife soon realized the true cost of her victory. Staring at me in horror, she declared in a terrified voice that we would never dine outside again, nor speak of the incident. I went home and toweled off.

The Doom of Jeff

Being a Sweat Person doesn’t weigh very heavily on me, normally. This is because I am also a Recluse Person who hardly ever leaves the house. Under normal circumstances I can sweat my ass off in private and never have to explain to people that no, I am not having a heart attack, this is just how I am.

Someday, of course, I’ll have my brain transferred to a cyborg chassis (like in a certain book) and sweat will no longer be a problem. Existential dread? Possibly, but not sweat.

The Hair Situation

FRIENDOS, after years of casual use in both my writing and my conversation I was recently forced to look up the meaning of the word hirsute. This is because the hair situation is getting dire. I’m not speaking solely of the haircut situation during our current emergency; as regular readers of this blog know, haircuts are one of my great obsessions owing to the social awkwardness of having someone touch your head and make small talk with you while wielding a sharp object. I regard the haircut as a huge waste of my time, but insecurity stops me from simply shaving my head or letting everything grow out to monstrous proportions, leaving me to simply complain weakly. Which I do on a regular basis.

No, while the haircut situation is, of course, dire, I am also an old man at this point, which means my body is in full revolt, which for some evolutionary reason beyond my understanding involves hair exploding out of unexpected places, in unexpected and unwanted volumes. Ears? Check. Nose? I pulled a nose hair out of myself a few days ago that was easily seven feet long. Back? Sweet lord. My DNA is apparently loaded with Gorilla bits. And I never really put much thought into my eyebrows until a year or so ago when my regular barber suddenly frowned mid-cut, retrieved some clippers, and carefully shaved what felt like a sweater’s worth of eyebrow hair away.

This is disturbing on the one hand due to mundane, common anxiety: It’s all evidence of advancing age, after all. It’s enraging for other reasons: I was promised (it might have been implicit) by the universe that adolescence was the last time I would have to sit by and watch helplessly as my own body humiliated me on a daily basis.

Full Body Sculpting

A big part of this horror is Reverse Vanity; I’ve always told myself that I am that particular brand of Cool Dude who doesn’t care about things like his hair or general presentation. This results in shaggy hair, sloppy clothes, and a generally dubious attitude towards Hair Product or Tools; when I let my so-called beard grow, I never trim it or groom it. I just let it grow wild until I look like an insane person and then shave it off, setting off a fresh cycle of shame.

But this is just a different kind of vanity, tied into the image of Laissez-Faire Jeff who is too cool to worry about meaningless stuff like whether he looks like Grizzly Adams after a rough weekend. So caring about the tufts of hair my body is now producing is off-brand, in a way, and doing anything about it would be seriously off-brand. So I just sit here, slowly being consumed by my own hair, which makes it sound like my body hair is some sort of parasite feeding off me, growing longer and more lustrous as I shrink and shrivel. Which is kind of what’s going on, actually, and now I am totally freaked out and regret writing this essay.

Of course, I have a complex relationship with my hair. First of all, the Blonde Betrayal. When I was tyke, I looked like this:

So I can be forgiven for assuming I would remain a fair-haired, adorable little moppet for life. Instead, by my teen years all my adorable moppetness had evaporated, leaving me the wreck you know and love. When I allowed my hair to grow in college, I didn’t do any sort of grooming (branding!) so it quickly became a pile of crap on my head, which made me feel less cool than I assumed long hair was supposed to. When I went to my old barber on Winter Break for a ‘trim,’ he sadistically ruined my hair to teach me a lesson.

I still bear all these hair-related scars. So all this weird new hair is just a cosmic insult.

Here at Somers Rules Ltd, however, we believe in science! to solve all problems, so I have embarked on an experiment to discover whether excessive alcohol consumption can cure the Hair Problem. I’ll keep y’all posted, though I suspect one look is all it will take to determine if it’s working.