Two issues recently plagued the Observer, but one was more urgent than the other.
The first was that, despite my best efforts, I was unable to think of anything to write about for this piece. Whether you have writer’s block or not, people who are assembling a magazine can’t really employ an observer without an observation.
My second issue was that I was becoming bald, which was less time-sensitive but undoubtedly more existential. Naturally, this was not breaking news. For decades, it had been a steadily unfolding story. However, it had become so obvious in recent years that haircuts were less about fashion and more about pointless attempts to hide my increasingly shiny pate without revealing that I was wearing a combover. Even though I knew what I had to do, I hadn’t had the guts to execute it yet.
One morning, while still thinking about the more urgent need to come up with a column concept, I was staring into the bathroom mirror when it occurred to me: What if I could handle both issues at once?
I took the clippers out of the drawer and gave the blade a 15mm guide. Was the duration appropriate? I have no idea! All I knew was that I had about five seconds to figure out how to talk myself out of this notion.
I switched on the clippers in one motion and proceeded right down the center of my scalp, from front to back. I then took the same route back to the front for precaution. Unless I wanted to go around looking like a complete crazy person, there was no turning back.
I changed to a 6mm guard after realizing after a minute or two that the 15mm guard was too short. I finished within a few minutes. At my feet, the majority of my hair was in clumps. For a while, I gazed at my reflection in the mirror, attempting to determine my feelings on the new appearance.
As soon as I stroked my palm across my scalp, the space monkeys from the film Fight Club came to mind. My ears, which had not been fully visible since the late 1970s, suddenly came into sharp focus. Given that my younger brother has been buzzing his hair short for at least 20 years and embraced baldness early in life, I pondered whether the haircut made me resemble him.
But more than anything, I questioned why I had been so afraid to try the shaven appearance.
The simple explanation is that shaving my head needed more than just acknowledging my baldness. I had to acknowledge that I was becoming older. The best memento mori is acknowledging that you are aging; it serves as a reminder that everyone dies eventually. Some individuals find inner peace with that realization; others, like Dylan Thomas, act as though ignoring our baldness is a necessary element of not having a nice night.
A more cursory, but perhaps more significant, response would be, I was afraid it would appear strange. It’s not simply strange that no one has ever seen me that way before. In the sense of the word, that guy’s head resembles a shaved scrotum, or he has a head that resembles a sphynx cat.
Regarding the first issue, there isn’t much I can do. An impulsive decision to cut my hair was not going to erase the fact that I’ve never been especially fond of thinking about my own mortality.
But it seems that my concerns about having an odd-looking skull were unjustified. It’s a typical round head, somewhat uninteresting in its lack of peculiarity.
As I stood there thinking about my melon’s tasteless sphericity, my fiancée appeared around the corner.
Whoa! When she noticed my new aerodynamic appearance, she said. I enjoy it!
After giving me a head rub, she burst out laughing.
With a little too much joy, she remarked, “It feels like kitten fur.”
After rolling my eyes, I joined her in giggling. Being referred to as “kitten head” is so far down the list of potential disastrous outcomes for this experiment that it hardly even registered.
Is this all part of a larger lesson? I don’t know. Perhaps it serves as a reminder to avoid allowing a fear of change to impede an otherwise simple choice. Or perhaps it’s a metaphor about coming to terms with aging as a natural part of life.
Then then, perhaps he was pressed for time and had run out of ideas, so he was simply a kitten-headed fool shaving his melon.
It’s dragon-slaying time!
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