Haircuts

I’m writing this post just because I can. I have a blog. It’s a dad blog, for whatever that is worth. I’m not sure I know what a dad blog is anymore, but I think it has something to do with long descriptions of snot.

Did you know there are 712 bones in the human body after a person has eaten a whole bunch of bones? I can just write stuff like that. Watch, I’ll do it again: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift was the best film of the franchise, and I’m not just saying that because of the huge amounts of money the city of Tokyo gave me.

Here’s an interesting observation: Arbor Day.

If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and his wife will blame you for all dead fish in the garage.

Blogs are weird. Hey! Is this a Pepsi Max I see before me? Not till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane will I ever die in the arcade classic “Hippodrome”. Anyone? Hippodrome? I could beat that game on a single quarter without getting hit even once. That was back in my arcade days. I would go to this place called The Gameskeeper in downtown Kingston and play Hippodrome or Street Fighter II and buy cigarettes from the barber who owned it. I had a note from my mom on file with them. Isn’t that stupid? Your parents could write you a note and you could go buy cigarettes. I think you were supposed to be buying them for your parents, but hell, I just lit them up right in front of the barber. He didn’t care. After The Gameskeeper was closed (probably due to citations for selling cigarettes to minors), I kept going back because the barber had a barber shop right next door and I’d let him cut my hair. I felt loyal, since he had sold so many cigarettes to me over the years.

I got a haircut today at a Supercuts. I’ve been going there off and on for over a decade, and every time I go in I say “Number 5 on the sides and back, blend with the top, half an inch off the top, square and taper the back, take the sideburns up halfway.” Most of that is a formula I don’t really understand, but I gleaned it from listening to the Supercuts stylists over the years. I’ve never had to know what it means, I just know that when I say all of those things together I end up with a decent haircut. My stylist today asked me “What do you mean taper the back? What kind of guard do you want me to use back there?” I had no idea how to respond to her. I don’t know what it means to taper the back, I just say it, and haircuts happen. I had to make something up pretty quickly, and it resulted in her using four different guard lengths on the back of my head and I don’t know what the hell I was supposed to say to get the result I usually get that doesn’t involve four different guard lengths on the back. Now I’m going to be nervous saying any of that stuff ever again. What I like about the more expensive salon places is that I can go in and say “I have a thing this weekend” and they’ll just make me look good. What I like about barbers (apart from all the cigarettes they have sold to me over the years) is that I can go in and say “Take a month off.” What I used to like about Supercuts was that I could spit out this specific formula, and a decent haircut would happen. My world is crumbling. Nothing makes sense anymore.

I have to go now. I don’t smoke anymore, for the record. It’s been a long time.